March 16, 2026

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Oil reserves tapped as nuclear assertions face pushback, warming fuels hail, and microbiome affects the brain

From emergency oil reserves to nuclear scrutiny, bigger hail, and research on a connection between the aging gut and the brain

By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Dan Vergano, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura

SASAN/Getty Images

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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.

Last Wednesday the International Energy Agency announced that its member countries would release 400 million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves to “address disruptions in oil markets stemming from the war in the Middle East.” This is the largest release in the group’s history and the first since 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine.

SciAm senior editor Dan Vergano is here to update us on the conflict and its oil impacts. Thank you for joining us today.

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Dan Vergano: Good to be here with you.

Pierre-Louis: The U.S. has recently entered into a military conflict with Iran, and my understanding is that President Donald Trump has said part of the rationale for this bombing…

[CLIP: President Donald Trump speaking at a press conference: "They would've had a nuclear weapon within 2 weeks to 4 weeks and they would have used it long before this press conference."]

Pierre-Louis: You recently wrote an article for Scientific American saying that isn’t the case, and I was hoping you could walk us through, like, why nuclear experts are saying that Iran was not on the precipice of having nuclear weapons.

Vergano: So the administration and President Trump have made a number of statements about how soon Iran would’ve had a nuclear weapon if they hadn’t launched this war. The thing is, we talked to experts in making nuclear bombs, and they said that that just ain’t so. What the president was describing is sort of at odds with just the raw physics or chemistry of making a bomb.

Pierre-Louis: I don’t want a “how to make a nuclear bomb” but sort of broadly speaking. [Laughs.]

Vergano: So, Kendra, when you make your nuclear bomb, what you first do is ...

Pierre-Louis: [Laughs.] This is how we end up canceled.

Vergano: Yeah, don’t want that.

So it turns out there’s different ways to do it, but if you’re gonna use uranium, you have to start by digging up a bunch of uranium ore. And you can’t just stuff uranium ore into a bomb. It won’t work. So what you have to do is process it to a material that’s mostly just uranium, called “yellowcake.” And so you take that and you mix it with acid, and you make a gas, UF6. And you throw this UF6 into spinning centrifuges to bring it up first to the 20 percent enriched level, which is the first stage at which you could make some kind of bomb out of it, not a very efficient one, and then bring it all the way up to 60 percent in the case of the Iranians, which is sort of an intermediate step before you bring it up to the 90 percent enriched stage, where you have the stuff for your one standard atomic bomb.

Pierre-Louis: So what you’re saying is that the Iranians have uranium, but it’s kind of at that 60 percent enrichment stage.

Vergano: Correct. According to the IAEA—the IAEA is the International Atomic Energy Agency; these are the watchdogs for nuclear power plants—the Iranians had [an estimated] 441 kilograms of uranium at the 60 percent enriched stage.

How do you go to 90 percent enriched? You keep spinning it in centrifuges. And before June of last year, when the Iranians had pretty efficient cascades of centrifuges set up, this is something that had been estimated would’ve taken ’em about three weeks.

So they sat for years. The last decade, ever since the Trump administration canceled the first nuclear proliferation agreement with Iran, they’ve sort of kept this stuff at that 60 percent level. But they could have, at any time, started spinning it up to 90 percent, and they hadn’t.

Pierre-Louis: So to be clear, it would take about three weeks for Iran to go from that 60 percent enrichment, where they’re kind of hanging out now, to the 90 percent enrichment that you could potentially use to make a weapon.

Vergano: So prior to June of 2025, Iran could have upgraded its uranium, enriched it to 90 percent, because they had a working nuclear enterprise that had all these cascades of centrifuges going—hundreds of them, according to the IAEA. But they