Brazil could produce weapons-grade uranium if it so chose
At the Itaguaí naval complex near Rio de Janeiro, and other sites scattered across Brazil, hundreds of engineers are slowly designing and piecing together parts of the Álvaro Alberto, a nuclear-powered submarine named after a former vice-admiral and pioneer of the country’s nuclear programme. If all goes to plan, it could land in the water at Madeira island in Itaguaí in the early 2030s, before Australia gets a sniff at its own subs.
Progress since then has been slow, though Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s current president, attended a ceremony marking the initial assembly of a prototype reactor in Iperó, 120km north-west of São Paulo, in October 2020. A month later the navy finalised the boat’s basic design. That was in no small part thanks to Naval Group, the largely state-owned French arms company whose jilting last month by Australia, as part of, provoked a diplomatic incident.
Geopolitical factors are at work, too. The subs have justified the need to master the complete fuel cycle—the process of mining, milling and enriching nuclear fuel—and thus placed Brazil “in the threshold between being a nuclear state and not being a nuclear state”, says Carlo Patti, author of “Brazil in the Global Nuclear Order”.
In practice, the subs are not much cause for worry. Brazilian nuclear material is monitored under a special bilateral pact with Argentina, which was signed in 1991. And unlike British and American subs, which use uranium enriched to the high levels suitable for a bomb, Brazil’s planned reactor will use low-enriched stuff that would need to be spun further for nefarious purposes.
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