How Many Centrifuges are Needed to Produce Highly Enriched Uranium?
As it relates to military purposes, which was Libya’s actual end goal, a single gas centrifuge can annually produce 30 grams of HEU. To annually produce 20-25 kilograms of HEU, the requisite amount for nuclear warhead assembly, it is necessary to run six tons of UF6 gas in 750-1000 gas centrifuges. Hence, to produce one kilogram of HEU requires processing 176 kilograms of UF6 gas. On average, each centrifuge would spin at 400 m/sec and would be about 1.5 meters long. The size of a typical enrichment facility that is capable of producing this amount of HEU per year is usually 600 square meters. From a nonproliferation standpoint, this is one of the pitfalls of the gas centrifuge enrichment method; a medium-sized warehouse or building can house a sufficient number of gas centrifuge cascades to produce one or more nuclear warheads per year. This makes uncovering enrichment facilities of potential proliferators more difficult. Unlike gaseous diffusion enrichment facilities, or even nuclear
