Comments on: Cut and Cover

By: blowback

blowback — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:56:50 +0000

Dr Ilchik – we might be talking at cross-purposes. I was not refering to the excavations around the buildings. The spoil heap I refer to is in the centre of this image from Google Earth. There is a distinct shadow along the northern edge but no shadow along the southern edge of the spoil tip which suggests that both edges are above the original surface rather than an area where cut and fill has been used to provide a flat area. The total area of the heap is in the region of 14,500 square metres.

BTW, what do you estimate the size of the two buildings to be?

Calutrons? I thought the Iranians used gas centrifuges.

By: - M

- M — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:58:49 +0000

Has anyone looked at what type of rock is present at Qom site in Iran? With that information you could extrapolate what type of excavation equipment is needed to create long deep tunnels and work chambers. Tunneling is very expensive and time consuming and needs large amounts of equipment, material and energy. The daily or weekly sat photos should indicate this activity.

By: Dr Robert Ilchik

Dr Robert Ilchik — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:46:44 +0000

Blowback,

I respectfully suggest that you re-examine the image. What you refer to are cut and fill used to flatten an area, these are not dumps. The S side has been excavated and the material dumped at the N end to make a flat spot. There is not 1,000,000+ tonnes (500k m3) of material here. The amount of relief you SPECULATE is way too high. From the toe of the excavation in the 2005 image to the nearby building is only 11 m at best.

Which again points out one of the major problems here: This is a basically flat area with a small (<60 m) hill a the S end. Given the amount of mining which has gone on in this country, why not use an abandoned mine for the purported clandestine facility?

The other major problem is where are the power lines needed to run all the calutrons? This facility is all above ground, is still under construction, and is most likely just what the Iranians claim it to be: an enrichment facility for reactor fuel.

By: kme

kme — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:31:04 +0000

hass: The most remarkable thing about all of this might well be the implication that Iran has (had) a good source on what the US IC knew – surely if true this would be a most remarkable fact…

By: walker

walker — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:14:47 +0000

The original post and some of the discussion seem to neglect the image taken between these two, linked by RAJ47, which shows the “halls” 1 and 2 under construction earlier this year before they were covered over. The structures from the 2005 image have clearly been removed.

By: hass

hass — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:41:52 +0000

Thought you wonks may be interested in Glenn Greenwald’s take on how the media is perpetuating fear on Iran as in case of Iraq:

What evidence is there that the Iranians reported this facility to the IAEA only because they learned that the U.S. had discovered the facility? For that matter, what evidence is there that the Iranians ever realized this at all? Whether Iran reported the facility voluntarily or only because they were forced to do so by virtue of having been “caught” is a self-evidently relevant fact to all of this, and yet the claims of anonymous officials on this question are uncritically assumed to be true without any skepticism, demands for evidence, or consideration of alternative views…. Provocative, unproven claims — ones that will obviously inflame war passions among a significant segment of the population — are passed on with no evidence and little questioning. Dissenting voices are excluded (other than a fleeting, token quote from the Iranian President buried in the middle). And overnight, an extremely fear-inciting and sensationalistic case against Iran was cemented as unchallengeable wisdom across the political spectrum.

By: RAJ47

RAJ47 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:41:31 +0000

Geoffrey,
check this image.
link text

By: Allen Thomson

Allen Thomson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:28:34 +0000

A useful quick summary of bunkers of various levels of hardness. Some are obviously designed with nukes in mind, but the ones with burster slabs are also for conventional attacks.

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11282&page=15

By: Ataune

Ataune — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:42:09 +0000

</a> Just trying to insert an end tag for the links.

By: blowback

blowback — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:11:35 +0000

Dr Ilchik – those spoil tips you see contain about 500,000 cubic metres of waste. The one you see in early images on Google Maps has an area of about 12,000 sqm and a depth of about 9 metres so that gives a volume of 108,000 cubic metres. Just eyeballing the first tip against the more recent one suggests that the more recent one is about four times the size of the earlier one, so that suggests that the total volume of spoil is about 550,000 cubic metres. If the first tip results from driving two access tunnels, then those tunnels could be between half a kilometer (large-bore tunnel) and three kilometers (small bore)long. If the second tip is the result of digging the chambers at the end of those access tunnels, then the chambers could be say 75,000 sqms and four metres in height.
As for the shafts and lift gear, you must have been in a drift mine.
With three kilometer long access tunnels, the chambers could be several hundred metres below the ground.
So I agree that cut and cover is unlikely but the evidence for the size of the underground workings is available in the satellite imagery we have access to.
My background, I trained as a civil engineer and have an acquaintanceship with tunnel sites.