Growing safety fears surrounding Israel’s largest, but ageing, atomic research center have provoked fresh questions over its future and a dilemma over the secrecy of the country’s alleged nuclear arsenal.
Israel, believed to be the Middle East’s sole nuclear power, has long refused to confirm or deny that it has such weapons.
The Haaretz newspaper on Tuesday reported that a study had uncovered 1,537 defects in the decades-old aluminum core of the Dimona nuclear reactor at the Negev Nuclear Research Center.
The defects at the center, where nuclear weapons were allegedly developed, were not seen to be severe and the risk of a nuclear outbreak is very limited, the report said.
However, there are growing calls for new safeguards and even a new research center — which could present the country with a decision on whether to acknowledge for the first time that it has nuclear weapons.
Officially the Dimona center focuses on research and energy provision.
However, in the 1980s nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, a former center technician, told a British newspaper that it was also used to create nuclear weapons.
He was later jailed for 18 years for the revelations.
The core of the Dimona reactor was provided by France in the late 1950s and went online a few years later.
Common practice is that such reactors are used for only 40 years, though this can be extended with modifications.
Uzi Even, a chemistry professor at Tel Aviv University who was involved in the creation of the reactor, is concerned about the safety of the site and has campaigned for a decade for it to be closed — “so far, to no avail.”
He called for it to be shut off for security reasons.
“This reactor is now one of the oldest still operating globally,” he said.
Michal Rozin, a lawmaker with the leftwing Meretz party, has called for a radical shakeup in policy in the light of the safety worries.
“The nuclear reactor has no supervision besides the body that runs it, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission,” she wrote in a letter to the parliamentary Foreign and Defense Committee.
“We don’t need to wait for a disaster to make a change,” she said.
Israel’s atomic energy agency said in a statement that the country had the “highest international standards” of security and safety, adding that many reactors can last for far longer than 40 years.
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