VIENNA, June 8: Iran began a fresh phase of uranium enrichment this week just as world powers presented it with incentives to halt nuclear fuel work, according to a UN nuclear watchdog agency report.
The report, emailed to the 35 states on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board ahead of a meeting starting on Monday, also said Iran was pressing ahead with installing more cascades of centrifuge enrichment machines.
Authored by IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei, the report said Iran resumed feeding ‘UF6’ uranium gas into its pilot 164-centrifuge cascade in Natanz on Tuesday after a pause of several weeks to do test runs of the machines without UF6.
Tuesday was the day European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana visited Tehran to hand over a package of economic, technological and security incentives for Iran to suspend work which could eventually produce atomic bombs.
Tehran says the goal of its nuclear fuel programme is solely electricity generation for its economy. The West suspects Iran, the world’s No. 4 oil producer, of creating a smokescreen for atomic bomb-making.
In April, Iran appeared to defeat a western bid to deny it enrichment technology when, for the first time, it purified a small amount of uranium at Natanz for use as power plant fuel.
A western intelligence source said hours before the IAEA report that Iran had stopped feeding gas into its pilot cascade later in April because of technical glitches, but then resolved them, allowing enrichment work to resume on Tuesday.
“This underlines the fact that the temporary halt was technical in nature. It’s a continuation of Iranian policy to profit from all worlds, dialogue to gain time while continuing to strive for an atomic bomb,” the source said.
Mr ElBaradei’s report said Iran had also launched a new drive on Tuesday to transform raw uranium ore into UF6 gas at its Isfahan conversion plant. As of April, Iran has stockpiled 118 tons of UF6 at Isfahan.
GLITCHES OVERCOME: A senior UN official familiar with Mr ElBaradei’s report said a few of the 164 centrifuges in the Natanz cascade had crashed since April, but Iranian scientists apparently isolated the problem and kept the rest of the network running.
But he said the pause in enrichment could also have been prompted by a wish ‘not to rock the boat’ at a crunch time in Iran’s standoff with six world powers, who agreed last week to consider sanctions if Tehran rebuffed the incentives package.
Iran has said it will seriously consider the overture but it has given no sign of backing away from its insistence on an indigenous nuclear fuel-enrichment programme.
Since the end of April, Iran had also been test-feeding UF6 gas into two separated centrifuges, the report said. It was unclear whether these were the embryos for two more cascades of 164 interconnected centrifuges it is building at Natanz.—Reuters
