TEHRAN, May 4: Iran said on Thursday it had made more progress in ultra-sensitive nuclear work, showing yet more defiance in the face of Western lobbying for tough Security Council action.

“Iran can now mass-produce centrifuges. This is an important success, because no other country was willing to sell us this technology,” a deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Hossein Faghihian, was quoted as saying in Iranian media.

Centrifuges are used to enrich uranium for either nuclear reactor fuel or atomic bomb material. They work in cascades of hundreds, or thousands, spinning at high speed to refine out the uranium U-235 isotope.

Enrichment is seen as a “breakout capacity”, because once mastered the manufacturing of nuclear weapons becomes possible. Iran says such work is legal, but Western powers argue the clerical regime cannot be trusted with it.

France and Britain on Wednesday circulated a draft resolution in the Security Council that would legally oblige Iran to comply with UN demands that it freeze uranium enrichment.

Thursday’s news on centrifuge development follows a string of other claims of nuclear progress.

State radio reported that Tehran was producing fuel rods for nuclear reactors.

Power-control rods, or fuel rods, contain low-enriched uranium and are inserted into a nuclear reactor’s core to make the reactor run.

“After sanctions from the US, experts from Iran’s atomic energy organization have produced better quality rods than the foreign samples,” said the official state-run radio.

The radio said these Iranian-produced rods were already in use in a 5-megawatt reactor built by the United States _ before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution — at the nuclear research centre in Tehran.

Wade Boese, a research director at the Arms Control Association, said that mastering the production of fuel rods was not a major technical development.–AFP/AP