U.S. officials say that strikes conducted on three key Iranian nuclear sites have devastated its nuclear program, but independent experts analyzing commercial satellite imagery say the nation's long-running nuclear enterprise is far from destroyed.
"At the end of the day there are some really important things that haven't been hit," says Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who tracks Iran's nuclear facilities. "If this ends here, it's a really incomplete strike."
In particular Lewis says the strike doesn't seem to have touched Iran's stocks of highly enriched uranium: "Today, it still has that material and we still don't know where it is," he says.
"I think you have to assume that significant amounts of this enriched uranium still exist, so this is not over by any means," agrees David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which has closely tracked Iran's nuclear program for years.
The independent assessments stand in stark contrast to congratulatory statements from the Trump Administration in the wake of the strikes: "Iran's nuclear ambitions have been obliterated," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said during a Pentagon press conference on Sunday. "The operation President Trump planned was bold and it was brilliant."
Both Lewis and Albright say that the strikes themselves may well have been effective, although it is difficult to say for sure. Satellite imagery shows six deep holes in the ground around Fordo, and ashy debris over much of the site. Albright believes that bunker-busters were used to try and strike at the enrichment facility's ventilation system, along with the main hall where uranium-enriching centrifuges were kept.
"I think the purpose of the attack was to take out centrifuges and infrastructure and they feel they accomplished that," Albright says.
But as evidence that the strikes may have missed the uranium stocks, both Albright and Lewis point to commercial satellite imagery from the days before the strike. The images show trucks at two key sites — Isfahan and Fordo. The trucks appear to be sealing tunnels that serve as entrances to underground facilities used to store uranium, possibly in anticipation of an American attack.

Both experts believe Iranians could have also moved their enriched uranium out of the sites in the run-up to the U.S. strikes: "There were trucks seen in imagery apparently hauling stuff away," Albright says. "One would assume that any enriched uranium stocks were hauled away."
The International Atomic Energy Agency had assessed that Iran has more than 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium 235 — enough for around ten bombs, according to independent experts. That 60% enriched uranium is carried in relatively small containers that could fit easily into cars, says Albright.
Although Albright believes the program has been substantially set back, he thinks it could still be reconstituted. He says Iran may also have thousands of uranium-enriching centrifuges that were never installed in Natanz and Fordo. It might be possible to move the uranium to another, covert facility, where it could be enriched to the required 90% for a nuclear weapon in a relatively short period of time. Even then, Iran would have to take further steps to fashion the uranium into a weapon.
"The program has been seriously set back, but there's a lot of odds and ends," Albright says. Ultimately he thinks the only way to truly end Iran's nuclear program is through additional nuclear inspections by international monitors and cooperation from the Iranian regime, probably though some kind of diplomatic agreement.
Lewis agrees: "Even the most brilliant bombing campaign probably is not going to get us where we want to be," he says.

This sums up where we are now:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DLAO1BOA3yG/
As a friend noted, "Trump created the problem. The single reason Iran was so close to obtaining a nuclear weapon is that Trump destroyed the diplomatic agreement that put major, verifiable constraints on their nuclear program. So of course the "MSM is doing a bang-up job right now of ignoring the fact that a criminal POTUS unilaterally declared war and instead focusing on Iran’s nuclear capabilities which had a deal w/USA until same criminal pulled out of it because it was achieved under Obama. Trump is a threat to peace everywhere."

From NY Times:
"A U.S. official said that six B-2 bombers dropped a dozen 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs on the Fordo nuclear site, which lies deep underground, and Navy submarines fired 30 TLAM cruise missiles at the Natanz and Isfahan sites. One B-2 also dropped two bunker busters on Natanz, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations."

IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON

Stocks pushed higher after the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran has been urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs.
Reuters has been told that Iran has asked Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman to press US President Donald Trump to use his influence on Israel for an immediate ceasefire in return for Tehran’s flexibility in talks about its nuclear program.

The U.S. pioneered the combination of solar panels and batteries that makes it possible to get power from the sun when it isn’t shining. Now it risks being left behind thanks to a trade war and Republicans’ plan to withdraw clean-energy subsidies.
The tax bill passed by the House would phase out tax breaks for various green technologies, including energy storage facilities that use batteries to store power that gets released when the grid needs it. Grid batteries are also heavily exposed to tariffs because, unlike EV batteries, practically none are made in the U.S. They are made in China.
This double whammy casts a shadow over a technology that is doing the heavy lifting as U.S. power demand rises for the first time in a generation. Batteries will account for 29% of the power capacity installed this year, behind only solar, the Energy Information Administration says.
The Senate may prolong the tax credits, and Wednesday’s court ruling that voided—for now—many of Trump’s tariffs underscores the uncertainty over trade policy. For green-energy companies that typically line up customers before committing to projects, that uncertainty makes it harder to put a price on power: “We have never seen such a high demand for energy, but there’s no way we can move forward,” said David Ruiz de Andrés, chief executive of solar-plus-storage company Grenergy.
The Madrid-based company has ambitions to grow in the U.S., lured by tech companies vying to build power-hungry data centers, but currently it isn’t investing in projects besides a few already under way. Grenergy’s new $4 billion investment plan prioritizes Europe, its home market, and Latin America, where it recently signed a deal with Chile’s state-controlled copper-mining giant, Codelco, to provide round-the-clock power from vast solar and battery arrays.
Solar power, 24/7 is becoming feasible (in very sunny places like Chile, anyway) thanks to battery technology improvements from Chinese manufacturers such as BYD and CATL. Their race to squeeze more capacity into less space reduced grid batteries’ cost by 40% between 2023 and 2024, according to BloombergNEF.

Not doomed, but more expensive-
Low costs, and the sheer availability of solar panels and batteries, means U.S. growth would likely be slowed rather than halted by trade barriers and withdrawn subsidies, said BloombergNEF policy expert Ethan Zindler: “Some projects will get canceled, some will go forward and get priced higher,” he said.
There aren’t enough gas turbines, let alone nuclear plants, to meet U.S. power demand. As Zindler sees it, the question is how much potential demand is destroyed by higher prices—tech companies can build more data centers in other countries—and how much Americans pay for electricity.

Microsoft made a significant statement by entering a twenty-year agreement with Constellation Energy, which plans to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown. Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6 billion to refurbish and restart the reactor by 2028 with an estimated 835 MW of capacity. Microsoft entered the agreement to provide the energy demands for its AI data centers.

There is one problem with this: we cannot continue to scale energy usage like this without making the Earth inhospitable to organic life.

we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.