TEHRAN, April 12: Iran announced on Tuesday it had successfully enriched uranium to make nuclear fuel, a dramatic breakthrough in its atomic drive that defies a UN Security Council demand for the work to be halted.

The announcement came just 15 days before the expiry of a Security Council deadline for Iran to freeze enrichment — a process that can be extended to make the fissile core of an atom bomb.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, whose government accuses Tehran of seeking nuclear weapons, immediately responded that Iran was ‘moving in the wrong direction’.

In a speech carried live on state television, vice president and atomic energy chief Gholam Reza Aghazadeh announced that ‘on April 9, we successfully enriched uranium to 3.5 per cent’, the purity required for civilian reactor fuel.

Mr Aghazadeh said the progress in enrichment ‘paves the way for enrichment on an industrial scale’, and revealed Iran also had 110 tons of UF6 gas — the feedstock gas that is fed into centrifuges to be enriched.

He also said Iran was ‘determined’ to complete work on a heavy water reactor in Arak, which could also produce plutonium for a nuclear weapon, within three years.

The announcement, made in the north-eastern city of Mashhad in the presence of top officials, was greeted by chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the work to be accelerated.—AFP