Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center

31°00′05″N 35°08′40″E / 31.0013°N 35.1445°E / 31.0013; 35.1445

The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center (Hebrew: קריה למחקר גרעיני – נגב ע"ש שמעון פרס, formerly the Negev Nuclear Research Center, sometimes unofficially referred to as the Dimona reactor) is an Israeli nuclear installation located in the Negev desert, about thirteen kilometers (eight miles) south-east of the city of Dimona.

Construction began in 1958 and its heavy-water nuclear reactor became active sometime between 1962 and 1964.

Israel claims that the nuclear reactor and research facility are for general "research purposes into atomic science", but the reactor has been involved in the production of nuclear materials for use in Israel's nuclear weapons program. Israel is believed to have produced its first nuclear weapons by 1967, and it has been estimated to possess anywhere between 80 and 400 nuclear weapons. The reactor is not a civil power plant and does not send electricity to the Israeli grid.

Information about the facility remains highly classified and the country maintains a policy known as strategic ambiguity—refusing either to confirm or deny their possession. Israel currently is a non-signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Israel reportedly opened Dimona to U.S. inspection in January 1965, with inspections continuing until 1969. The airspace over the Dimona facility is closed to all aircraft, and the area around it is heavily guarded and fenced off. During the Six-Day War, an Israeli missile shot down an Israeli Air Force Dassault Ouragan fighter that inadvertently flew over Dimona.

In August 2018, it was renamed after the late president and prime minister of Israel Shimon Peres.

Facility construction started in 1958, with French assistance according to the Protocol of Sèvres agreements. The complex was constructed in secret, and outside the International Atomic Energy Agency inspection regime. To maintain secrecy, French customs officials were told that the largest of the reactor components, such as the reactor tank, were part of a desalination plant bound for Latin America. Estimates of the cost of construction vary; the only reliable figure is from Shimon Peres himself, who wrote in his 1995 memoir that he and David Ben-Gurion collected US$40 million, "half the price of a reactor ... [from] Israel's friends around the world." Based on this, it can be surmised a construction cost figure of around US$80 million or likely close to a billion dollars in 2023, adjusted for inflation.