Concerns raised over Iran fuel plan
Iran risks damaging trust with the international community by resuming work on its nuclear fuel cycle according to some diplomats.
Although Iran would not be violating its agreement to suspend uranium enrichment, diplomats said on Monday that Iran’s move could hurt confidence that it is doing everything possible to prove it is not secretly developing nuclear weapons.
Iran’s atomic energy chief Gholam Reza Aghazadeh said in Tehran on Sunday that Iran had resumed work on a first part of the nuclear fuel cycle, doing uranium conversion at a processing plant in Isfahan.
The Isfahan installation is a uranium conversion facility (UCF), where uranium is transformed into a yellow cake that can then be used to produce enriched uranium.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Monday that Iran had already told the IAEA in February that it would be resuming work on uranium conversion.
Earlier discussed
“The Iranians reported to us in February that they were going to begin this activity in March, and IAEA inspectors will be visiting the Isfahan facility this week,” IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told French news agency AFP.
A Western diplomat close to the IAEA said that while the Iranians may “technically” have the right under a deal worked out in October with Britain, France and Germany to carry out uranium conversion, the Iranians had also pledged to stop all enrichment-related activities.
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“It depends on what they’re doing exactly. It’s not black and white. There’s a big political context,” to the suspension of uranium enrichment since the IAEA has portrayed this as a measure to build confidence that Iran is cooperating with international inspections, the diplomat said.
One diplomat said the uranium conversion was “not something that was part of the suspension. It was just not part of the suspension deal.”
The suspension has “only to do with the production of uranium hexafluoride,” he said.
He added that the Iranians do “not have the capability to produce uranium hexafluoride” at Isfahan.
Highly enriched uranium can be fuel for a civilian power reactor but also the raw material for an atom bomb.
Year-long investigation
The IAEA has been investigating since February 2003 whether Iran’s nuclear programme is peaceful, or devoted to secretly developing atomic weapons, as the United States alleges.
It is to report its findings at a meeting in Vienna in June that the agency’s chief Muhammad al-Baradai has said will be “key in the … consideration of Iran’s implementation” of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
An IAEA ruling that Iran is in non-compliance with the NPT would send the issue to the UN Security Council, which could then impose sanctions on the Islamic republic.
Iran, under massive international pressure to maintain the suspension of uranium enrichment, has consistently emphasised its right under the NPT to produce nuclear fuel for what it insists are strictly peaceful purposes.
Iran also appears to be working to a narrower definition of the suspension – which diplomats say the Europeans had hoped would entirely halt Tehran’s work on the highly sensitive nuclear fuel cycle.