DUBAI: Iran has converted a fraction of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium into material crucial for detecting cancers and other diseases, the UN nuclear watchdog and an Iranian media report said on Friday.

Iran’s decision to convert the uranium takes it out of a form that can potentially be further refined into weapons-grade levels. The development comes as talks in Vienna over restoring Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers hang in the balance.

In a statement on Friday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had used 2.1 kilograms of its 60 per cent enriched uranium to produce so-called “highly enriched uranium targets” at a facility in Isfahan. Those targets will be irradiated at the Tehran Research Reactor and later used to produce molybdenum-99, the IAEA said.

Israel wants Iranian Revolutionary Guards retained on US terror list

Molybdenum-99 decays within days into a form of an isotope called technetium-99m, which is used in scans that can detect cancer and assess blood supply to the heart. In the US, technetium-99m is used in over 40,000 medical procedures a day, according to the Energy Department.

Increasingly, countries around the world use low-enriched uranium to create the needed isotope to avoid the proliferation risks of employing highly enriched uranium.

Iran’s semiofficial Mehr news agency, quoting unnamed officials it referred to as informed sources, acknowledged that some of this material had been reprocessed. The report added that 2 kilograms of the material could help one million people.

The IAEA said that as of Feb 19, Iran had a stockpile of 33.2 kilograms of 60pc enriched uranium material a short, technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90pc.

Revolutionary Guards

Israel on Friday appealed to the United States not to remove Iran’s Revolutionary Guards from its blacklist of foreign terrorist organisations as part of a revived nuclear deal.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “is a terrorist organisation that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans,” Prime Minister Naftali Ben­nett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said in a joint statement issued in Jerusalem.

“We refuse to believe that the United States would remove its designation as a terrorist organisation,” they said. “The fight against terrorism is a global one, a shared mission of the entire world.”

Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2022