Nuclear weapons, too, can be produced using either uranium enriched to weapons-grade or plutonium.
It would require laboratory equipment and scientific knowledge to make a more potent, weapons-grade version, he said.
It is building a facility in South Carolina to transform excess weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for nuclear reactors.
In a major and welcomed development, Russia announced that it will close its last weapons-grade plutonium production reactor.
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Unfortunately for Kodak, not even weapons-grade nuclear power could save the company from its own irrelevance in the digital age.
Russia and America finalised a decade-old deal to eliminate 68 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium, enough for nearly 17, 000 nuclear devices.
That reactor type is not ideal for producing weapons-grade plutonium, but all reactors produce plutonium that could be used in a nuclear explosion.
International powers want it to stop enriching uranium to a level of 20%, which can then be more easily enriched to weapons-grade level.
One reason why many people distrust nuclear power is because they believe it is impossible to separate civil reactors from weapons-grade fissile material.
For uranium to work in a nuclear reactor it must be enriched to contain 2-3% uranium-235 while weapons-grade uranium must contain 90% or more uranium-235.
But weapons-grade fuel is still used in some reactors, said Lyman.
That, Mr Netanyahu said, represented the point when Iran would have sufficient 20%-enriched uranium to produce enough of the weapons-grade variety needed for a nuclear warhead.
While most are enriching below 20 percent, this material, too could be turned into weapons-grade uranium, although with greater effort than is the case for the 20-percent stockpile.
The U.S. and its allies are seeking to gain Iran's willingness to suspend its production of near weapons-grade nuclear material at its uranium-enrichment sites in return for economic incentives.
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By not using weapons-grade enriched fuels, they are nonproliferating.
U.S. and Israeli officials believe Iran's moves represent a delay, rather than a change of heart, and that other actions are accelerating the pace at which the country could create weapons-grade fuel.
In the midst of the mayhem, they must also shut down an unexpected threat in the nick of time - prevent five tons of weapons-grade plutonium from falling into the wrong hands.
What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles?
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At the talks in the Kazakh city of Almaty they are asking Tehran only to greatly limit its production and stockpiling of uranium enriched to 20 percent, which is just a technical step away from weapons-grade uranium.
In softening its demand for a full declaration from North Korea, the United States concluded it is more important to get North Korea to surrender its weapons-grade plutonium than risk the deal fall apart all together, officials said.
They are fast enough to scan trucks and cars as they pass through toll booths, portable enough to be used almost anywhere and sensitive enough to distinguish between a weapons-grade isotope and the less dangerous form in an X-ray machine.
Experts including Duelfer and Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, believe Saddam has the sophisticated triggers, weapon housings and everything else he needs to build a nuclear device--except for a sufficient supply of weapons-grade enriched uranium.
In 1994, North Korea agreed to stop making plutonium, in return for which America and its allies would supply the country with fuel oil and build two Western-designed light-water nuclear reactors (since it is a bit harder to produce weapons-grade materials from such reactors than from the ones North Korea had been building).
The Russian businessman also has been accused of assembling a fleet of cargo planes to traffic military-grade weapons to conflict zones around the world since the 1990s.
Fourteen years of no-new-nuke-orders later, uranium mining's drop in popularity came with the post-Cold War decision to buy Soviet weapons and turn them into reactor-grade fuel.
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