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There were also a caravan of trucks removing large amounts of items before the raid. There are estimates Iran has 600 kg of enriched uranium. One kg of uranium is about the size as a kg of gold, or the size of a phone. So they probably removed some of the harder to replace equipment. Could have been anything. Servers, weapons and ammunition, etc.

Centrifuge manufacturing has come a long way in the previous 20 years. Precision machining has newer models with up to 200,000 rpm. "Centrus (formerly USEC) plans a centrifuge with 60 cm diameter, 12 m height and 900 m/s peripheral speed." Even with their centrifuge manufacturing facilities hit/destroyed, they could reconstitute within a year or two and continue the refinement process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge



200,000 revolutions per minute?

Boggles the mind that this is 3,333 revolutions per second.

I'm not saying you're wrong but a quick check of a few LLMs says that 90,000 RPM is widely cited as the practical upper limit for current operational centrifuges in facilities like those operated by Urenco, Rosatom, or Orano.

900m/s is approx Mach 1.5.


You can buy a lab centrifuge (such as Optima MAX from Coulter) that does 150 000 RPM, (or as a more useful measure, about a million g). These are often used for virus purification.

But isotope separation is usually done on UF6, which is a gas. These centrifuges work a bit differently, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge


While I don't know much about centeifuges, I'm still in awe that this Hikoki handheld blower does 90k rpm: https://www.hikoki-powertools.com/products/powertools/li-ion...

That's not a typo, I actually own this device and couldn't believe at first this thing spins with ninety thousand rpm. A lot has happened since my last 5400rpm hdd bit the dust.




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