nuclear reactor

BEERSHEBA, Israel — As Israel and Iran exchanged more attacks on Thursday, President Trump sought to keep open the door to diplomacy on Tehran’s nuclear program, saying he would make up his mind within two weeks on whether the U.S. military will get directly involved in the conflict.

“Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters, reading out Trump’s statement.

Trump has been weighing whether to attack Iran by striking its well-defended Fordo uranium enrichment facility, which is buried under a mountain and widely considered to be out of reach of all but America’s “bunker-buster” bombs.

Earlier in the day, Israel’s defense minister threatened Iran’s supreme leader after Iranian missiles crashed into a major hospital in southern Israel and hit residential buildings near Tel Aviv, wounding at least 240 people. As rescuers wheeled patients out of the smoldering hospital, Israeli warplanes launched their latest attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz blamed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for Thursday’s barrage and said the military “has been instructed and knows that in order to achieve all of its goals, this man absolutely should not continue to exist.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he trusted that Trump would “do what’s best for America.”

“I can tell you that they’re already helping a lot,” Netanyahu said from the rubble and shattered glass around the Soroka Medical Center in Israel’s southern city of Beersheba.

The open conflict between Israel and Iran erupted last Friday with a surprise wave of Israeli airstrikes targeting nuclear and military sites, top generals and nuclear scientists. At least 639 people, including 263 civilians, have been killed in Iran and more than 1,300 wounded, according to a Washington-based Iranian human rights group.

Iran has retaliated by firing hundreds of missiles and drones, killing at least 24 people in Israel and wounding hundreds.

More than 200 wounded, including dozens in the hospital strike

At least 240 people were wounded by the latest Iranian attack on Israel, including 80 patients and medical workers wounded in the strike on the Soroka Medical Center. The vast majority were lightly wounded, as much of the hospital building had been evacuated in recent days.

Israel’s Home Front Command said that one of the Iranian ballistic missiles fired Thursday morning had been rigged with fragmenting cluster munitions. Rather than a conventional warhead, a cluster munition warhead carries dozens of submunitions that can explode on impact, showering small bomblets around a large area and posing major safety risks on the ground. The Israeli military did not say where that missile had been fired.

Iranian officials insisted that they had not sought to strike the hospital and claimed the attack hit a facility belonging to the Israeli military’s elite technological unit, called C4i. The website for the Gav-Yam Negev advanced technologies park, some 2 miles from the hospital, said C4i had a branch campus in the area.

The Israeli army did not respond to a request for comment. An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, acknowledged that there was no specific intelligence that Iran had planned to target the hospital.

Many hospitals in Israel, including Soroka, had activated emergency plans in the last week. They converted parking garages to wards and transferred vulnerable patients underground.

Israel also has a fortified, subterranean blood bank that kicked into action after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the latest war in the Gaza Strip.

Doctors at Soroka said that the Iranian missile struck almost immediately after air raid sirens went off, causing a loud explosion that could be heard from a safe room. The strike inflicted the greatest damage on an old surgery building and affected key infrastructure, including gas, water and air-conditioning systems, the medical center said.

The hospital, which provides services to around 1 million residents of Israel’s south, had been caring for 700 patients at the time of the attack. After the strike, the hospital closed to all patients except for life-threatening cases.

Iran has fired 450 missiles and 1,000 drones at Israel since the conflict began, according to Israeli army estimates, though most have been shot down by Israel’s multitiered air defenses.

Iran rejects calls to surrender or end its nuclear program

Iran has long maintained its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. But it is the only non-nuclear-weapon state to enrich uranium up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.

Israel is widely believed to be the only country with a nuclear weapons program in the Middle East, but has never acknowledged the existence of its arsenal.

In the last few days, the Israeli air campaign has targeted Iran’s enrichment site at Natanz, centrifuge workshops around Tehran, a nuclear site in Isfahan and what the army assesses to be most of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers. The destruction of those launchers has contributed to the steady decline in Iranian attacks since the start of the conflict.

On Thursday, antiaircraft artillery was clearly audible across Tehran and witnesses in the central city of Isfahan reported seeing antiaircraft fire after nightfall.

In announcing that he would take up to two more weeks to decide whether to strike Iran, President Trump opened up diplomatic options with the apparent hope Iran would make concessions after suffering major military losses.

Already, a new diplomatic initiative seemed to be underway as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi prepared to travel Friday to Geneva for meetings with the European Union’s top diplomat, and with his counterparts from the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

But at least publicly, Iran has struck a hard line.

Iran’s supreme leader on Wednesday rejected U.S. calls for surrender and warned that any American military involvement by the Americans would cause “irreparable damage to them.”

Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf on Thursday criticized Trump for using military pressure to gain an advantage in nuclear negotiations.

“The delusional American president knows that he cannot impose peace on us by imposing war and threatening us,” he said.

Iran agreed to redesign Arak to address nuclear concerns

Israel’s military said Thursday its fighter jets targeted the Arak heavy water reactor, some 155 miles southwest of Tehran, in order to prevent it from being used to produce plutonium.

Iranian state TV said there was “no radiation danger whatsoever” around the Arak site, which it said had been evacuated ahead of the strike.

Heavy water helps cool nuclear reactors, but it produces plutonium as a byproduct that can potentially be used in nuclear weapons. That would provide Iran another path to the bomb beyond enriched uranium, should it choose to pursue the weapon.

Iran had agreed under its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers to redesign the facility to alleviate proliferation concerns. That work was never completed.

The reactor became a point of contention after Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. Ali Akbar Salehi, a high-ranking nuclear official in Iran, said in 2019 that Tehran bought extra parts to replace a portion of the reactor that it had poured concrete into under the deal.

Israel said strikes were carried out “in order to prevent the reactor from being restored and used for nuclear weapons development.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that due to restrictions imposed by Iran on inspectors, the U.N. nuclear watchdog has lost “continuity of knowledge” about Iran’s heavy water production — meaning it could not absolutely verify Tehran’s production and stockpile.

Mednick, Melzer and Gambrell write for the Associated Press. Melzer reported from Tel Aviv, and Gambrell from Dubai. AP writer Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv and Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump signed executive orders Friday intended to quadruple domestic production of nuclear power within the next 25 years, a goal experts say the United States is highly unlikely to reach.

To speed up the development of nuclear power, the orders grant the U.S. Energy secretary authority to approve advanced reactor designs and projects, taking authority away from the independent safety agency that has regulated the U.S. nuclear industry for five decades.

The order comes as demand for electricity surges amid a boom in energy-hungry data centers and artificial intelligence. Tech companies, venture capitalists, states and others are competing for electricity and straining the nation’s electric grid.

“We’ve got enough electricity to win the AI arms race with China,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said. “What we do in the next five years related to electricity is going to determine the next 50” years in the industry.

Still, it’s unlikely the U.S. could quadruple its nuclear production in the time frame the White House specified. The United States lacks any next-generation reactors operating commercially and only two large reactors have been built from scratch in nearly 50 years. Those two reactors, at a nuclear plant in Georgia, were completed years late and at least $17 billion over budget.

Trump is enthusiastic

At the Oval Office signing, Trump, surrounded by industry executives, called nuclear a “hot industry,” adding, “It’s time for nuclear, and we’re going to do it very big.”

Burgum and other speakers said the industry has stagnated and has been choked by overregulation.

“Mark this day on your calendar. This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of overregulation of an industry,’’ said Burgum, who chairs Trump’s newly formed Energy Dominance Council.

The orders would reorganize the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ensure quicker reviews of nuclear projects, including an 18-month deadline for the NRC to act on industry applications. The measures also create a pilot program intended to place three new experimental reactors online by July 4, 2026 — 13 months from now — and invoke the Defense Production Act to allow emergency measures to ensure the U.S. has the reactor fuel needed for a modernized nuclear energy sector.

The NRC is assessing the executive orders and will comply with White House directives, spokesperson Scott Burnell said Friday.

Jacob DeWitte, chief executive of the nuclear energy company Oklo, brought a golf ball to the Oval Office. He told Trump that’s the amount of uranium that can power someone’s needs for their entire life.

“It doesn’t get any better than that,” he said, holding up the ball.

“Very exciting indeed,” Trump said.

Trump has signed a spate of executive orders promoting oil, gas and coal that warm the planet when burned to produce electricity. Nuclear reactors generate electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. Trump said reactors are safe and clean but did not mention climate benefits. Safety advocates warn that nuclear technology still comes with significant risks that other low-carbon energy sources don’t, including the danger of accidents or targeted attacks, and the unresolved question of how to store tens of thousands of tons of hazardous nuclear waste.

The order to reorganize the NRC will include significant staff reductions but is not intended to fire NRC commissioners who lead the agency. David Wright, a former South Carolina elected official and utility commissioner, chairs the five-member panel. His term ends June 30, and it is unclear whether he will be reappointed.

Critics have trepidations

Critics say the White House moves could compromise safety and violate legal frameworks such as the Atomic Energy Act. Compromising the independence of the NRC or encouraging it to be circumvented entirely could weaken the agency and make regulation less effective, said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Simply put, the U.S. nuclear industry will fail if safety is not made a priority,” he said.

Gregory Jaczko, who led the NRC under President Obama, said Trump’s executive orders look like someone asked an AI chatbot, “How do we make the nuclear industry worse in this country?”

He called the orders a “guillotine to the nation’s nuclear safety system” that will make the country less safe, the industry less reliable and the climate crisis more severe.

A number of countries are speeding up efforts to license and build a new generation of smaller nuclear reactors to meet a surging demand for electricity and supply it carbon-free. Last year, Congress passed legislation that President Biden signed to modernize the licensing of new reactor technologies so they can be built faster.

This month, the power company in Ontario, Canada, began building the first of four small nuclear reactors.

Valar Atomics is a nuclear reactor developer in California. Founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor said nuclear development and innovation in the United States has been slowed by too much red tape, while Russia and China are speeding ahead. He said he’s most excited about the mandate for the Energy Department to speed up the pace of innovation.

The NRC is currently reviewing applications from companies and a utility that want to build small nuclear reactors to begin providing power in the early 2030s. Currently, the NRC expects its reviews to take three years or less.

Tori Shivanandan, chief operating officer of Radiant Nuclear, a California-based startup, said the executive orders mark a “watershed moment” for nuclear power in the U.S., adding that Trump’s support for the advanced nuclear industry will help ensure its success.

Daly and McDermott write for the Associated Press.

By AP with Indrabati Lahiri

Published on
21/05/2025 – 11:32 GMT+2

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Oil prices surged on Wednesday after a report by CNN suggested that Israel could launch an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, according to new US intelligence. 

US crude oil jumped 1.1% on Wednesday morning to $62.7 per barrel, whereas Brent crude oil advanced 1% to $66 per barrel. 

However, CNN emphasised that it wasn’t clear as yet whether a confirmed decision about the possible attack had been made.

Oil markets have been volatile for the last few days, mainly because of anticipation around the next round of Iran-US nuclear talks, due to be held this weekend. These talks are also expected to help increase global oil supply. 

However, any strike against Iran by Israel is likely to negatively impact these negotiations, which in turn, could further fuel Middle Eastern tensions and significantly affect oil markets. 

Although Israel has not been shy about its intentions to target Iran, several Iranian nuclear facilities may already be capable of defending themselves against the majority of strikes. 

Robert Rennie, head of commodity and carbon research for Westpac Banking Corp, said, as reported by Bloomberg: “This is the clearest sign yet of how high the stakes are in the US-Iran nuclear talks and the lengths Israel may go to if Iran insists on maintaining its commercial nuclear capabilities.”

He added: “Crude will maintain a risk premium as long as the current talks appear to be going nowhere.”

Traditional forex safe havens such as the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc also saw a slight boost following the release of the CNN report. 

US-Iran nuclear talks hang in the balance

In talks on the nuclear issue, Iranian officials have warned they could pursue a nuclear weapon with their stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to unleash airstrikes targeting Iran’s program if a deal isn’t reached.

US special envoy Steve Witkoff said in an ABC News interview on Sunday, as reported by the BBC: “We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability. We’ve delivered a proposal to the Iranians that we think addresses some of this without disrespecting them. We want to get to a solution here. And we think that will be able to.”

He added: “But everything begins from our standpoint with a deal that does not include enrichment. We cannot have that. Because enrichment enables weaponisation, and we will not allow a bomb to get here.”

Earlier this week, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei revealed that he did not believe that the latest round of talks between Iran and the US would be successful.

Despite rising sanctions from the US and some of its allies such as Europe and the UK, Iran has been able to continue exporting crude oil and has also increased its supply in the last few months.

Ongoing Middle Eastern conflicts such as the Israel-Hamas war and Houthi Red Sea attacks have gone a long way in souring relations between Israel and Iran in the last several months.

As such, any new attack, especially on Iran’s nuclear facilities may significantly affect the wider Middle Eastern region and further delay any hope of stability in the area.