JERUSALEM, Jan 8: An Israeli television channel has for the first time aired footage of the country's controversial top-secret Dimona nuclear facility.

Channel 10 showed the 15-minute video on Friday as part of a documentary on the plant in the southern Negev desert, an installation which international inspectors have never been allowed to visit.

The footage consists essentially of wide shots of the compound's neatly-groomed gardens and there are no close-ups of the dome-shaped reactor, which can only be seen in the background.

Israel has never publicly acknowledged that it maintains a nuclear arsenal but foreign experts say it has used the reactor at Dimona to produce between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads.

Channel 10 refused to say how it obtained the video but the footage was approved by the military censorship, in an apparent change in attitude on the part of the Israeli authorities.

The first-ever still pictures of the reactor were released in 1986 by Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the 40-year-old reactor. The whistle-blower was famously kidnapped in Rome and jailed by Israel for 18 years on treason charges.

Satellite pictures of the plant have also been published since then.

Late last year, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ruled out the possibility of foreign experts coming to carry out independent safety checks on the reactor which was built with French aid at the beginning of the 1950s.

There have been a number of calls for the closure of the plant with campaigners arguing that the life span of such reactors is 40 years.-AFP