Abdul Qadeer Khan - Research in Europe

Research in Europe

In 1972, the year he received his doctorate, Abdul Qadeer Khan through a former university classmate, Friedrich Tinner, and a recommendation from his old professor and mentor, Martin J. Brabers, joined the senior staff of the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory in Amsterdam. At first, he was responsible for evaluating the high-strength metals to be used for centrifuge components. The Physics Laboratory was a subcontractor for URENCO Group, the uranium enrichment research facility at Almelo, Netherlands, which had been established in 1970 by the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands to assure a supply of enriched uranium for European nuclear reactors. According to one of Qadeer Khan's closest theorist, Dr. Ghulam Dastigar Alam, pointed out that Qadeer Khan was highly proficient in in German, French and English landuages, and the Physics Laboratories administration gave him a handful set of drawing of a centrifuge machines for translation. Soon after, Qadeer Khan left the laboratories to join the senior scientific staff of the URENCO Group after URENCO offered him a prestigious position. There, Qadeer Khan was in charge and responsible for performing physics experiments on uranium metallurgy and was tasked to produce commercial-grade uranium usable for light water reactors. In the meantime, the URENCO Group gave drawings of centrifuges for the solution of engineering problems that URENCO's engineers were facing. The URENCO facility used Zippe-type centrifuge technology to separate the fissile isotopes 235U from non-fissile 238U by spinning UF₆ gas at up to 100,000RPM. Abdul Qadeer Khan's academic and leading-edge research in metallurgy brought great laurels to URENCO Group. In a short span of time, Khan earned a great reputation there, and enjoyed a distinguished career at URENCO. One of his greatest achievements was to enhance and improve the efficiency of the gas-centrifuges, which he did all alone. URENCO enjoyed a great academic relationship with Dr. Qadeer Khan, and URENCO had Qadeer Khan as one of the most senior scientists at the research facility where he worked and researched. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan was responsible for improving the efficiency of the centrifuges used by URENCO, and greatly contributed to the technological advancement of the Zippe technology, a technology that was developed by Gernot Zippe, a mechanical engineer, in the Soviet Union during the 1940s. URENCO granted Qadeer Khan access to the most restricted areas of its facility as well as to the most restricted and highly classified documentation on gas centrifuge technology. During this time, URENCO had granted this privilege to few of the senior academic scientists who were working in the highly secretive and classified research projects.

Uranium enrichment is an extremely difficult process, as 235U exists in natural uranium at a concentration of only 0.7%; for the purposes of most power-generation reactors the concentration of that isotope has to be increased about fivefold, to at least 3%. The trick is to isolate and shed a similar isotope known as 238U, which is barely 1% heavier. By spinning at very high speeds—electrically driven to 100,000 Rpm, in perfect balance, on superb bearings, in a vacuum, linked by pipes to thousands of other units doing the same—this is what the centrifuge achieves. Much of the technical details of these centrifuge systems are regulated as secret information and subject to export controls because they could be used for the purposes of proliferation, and useful to make weapon-grade fuel for weapon making purposes.