What’s Going on at Dimona?

Sept. 8— AP published satellite imagery Sept. 4 showing new construction going on at Israel’s Dimona nuclear site. The construction work, they say, has recently intensified on a major new structure which experts consulted by AP say could be a new reactor or a facility to assemble nuclear arms—but secrecy shrouding the program makes it difficult to know for sure. Other sources report that the Netanyahu security cabinet secretly approved moves to increase and upgrade Israel's nuclear arsenal following its 12-day war with Iran. Infrastructure to support such action, these sources say, is being put into place, and activity at Dimona is related to that.

The work at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona will renew questions about Israel’s status as the Mideast’s only nuclear-armed state, AP continues. It could also draw international criticism, especially since it comes after Israel and the United States bombed nuclear sites across Iran, in June, over their fears that the Islamic Republic could use its enrichment facilities to pursue an atomic weapon. Seven experts who examined the images all said they believed the construction was related to Israel’s nuclear weapons program, given its proximity to the reactor at Dimona, where no civilian power plant exists. According to wikipedia, Israel has no civilian nuclear power plants generating electricity. An examination of historical imagery available on Google Earth shows that construction began at the site no later than sometime in 2021

AP then goes on to quote experts on either side of the debate. “It’s probably a reactor—that judgement is circumstantial but that’s the nature of these things,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, who based his assessment on the images and Dimona’s history. “It’s very hard to imagine it is anything else.” It’s not unreasonable to think so. AP notes that Dimona’s current heavy water reactor, which came online in the 1960s, has been operating far longer than most reactors of the same era. That suggests it will need to be replaced or retrofitted soon.

“If it’s a heavy water reactor, they’re seeking to maintain the capability to produce spent fuel that they then can process to separate plutonium for more nuclear weapons,” said Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. “Or they are building a facility to maintain their arsenal or build additional warheads.”