So the IAEA “announced”:http://iaea.org/newscenter/news/2011/cleanlabext.html a few days back that it has opened the Safeguards Clean Laboratory Extension, which is part of the Environmental Sample Laboratory located at SAL. That laboratory, as the IAEA “explains,”:http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/SV/Safeguards/analytical-services.html analyzes environmental samples in order to help “detect the absence of undeclared material and activities in” IAEA member-states.

This is distinct from the Nuclear Material Laboratory, which is also located at SAL and analyzes nuclear material samples collected from member-states’ declared nuclear facilities in order to “verify States’ nuclear material accountancy declarations.”

Anyway, the clean lab extension houses a new Large Geometry Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (LG-SIMS) which, according to the IAEA, is pretty amazing:

bq. If human vision were as acute as the LG-SIMS, we would be able to sort through millions of objects in the asteroid belt to detect a single tennis ball. This level of resolution is needed when the Clean Laboratory Extension is analysing minute particles whose weight is measured in “femtograms”. That unit is equivalent to a quadrillionth of a gram, roughly 10 000 times smaller than a grain of sand, or about the weight of a human cell. Such precise analysis allows forensic experts in Seibersdorf to determine a uranium isotope particle’s distinctive fingerprint. Those clues then yield information about where it was mined, how it was processed and to which level of enrichment.

That paragraph is IAEA-speak for “dog’s bollocks.”

You all know that ISIS and “Arms Control Wonk”:http://lewis.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/4447/iaea-dg-reports-on-iran-dprk posted the IAEA reports on “North Korea”:http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/IAEA_DPRK_2Sept2011.pdf and “Iran.”:http://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/IAEA_Iran_2Sept2011.pdf

Each document has several interesting aspects, but I was struck by the section of the N Korea report which explains that Libya told the IAEA in 2003 that it had imported from the AQK network “two small cylinders containing UF6 in September 2000, and one large cylinder containing UF6 in February 2001.”

This is significant, I think, because it’s the first time that the IAEA has confirmed that the natural UF6 in the large container “very likely” originated in North Korea. That wasn’t “so clear”:http://www.armscontrol.org/print/1763 a few years ago. This also, of course, indicates that North Korea had non-trivial “undeclared conversion capabilities prior to 2001.” There have been question marks about such a capability.

Interestingly, the report says that the UF6 in the other two containers probably didn’t come from N Korea, even though all three containers were in that country. The report does not say where this UF6 came from.

Not bad for one paragraph.

*UPDATE:*

Ah. ISIS “noticed this as well.”:http://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/isis-analysis-of-iaea-safeguards-report-on-the-democratic-peoples-republic-/

Well.

The IAEA is “hosting”:http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/2011/prn201112.html the Forum on Experience of Possible Relevance to the Creation of a Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in the Middle East 11/21-22. Interesting.