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Iran Admits Misstating Plutonium Program to IAEA By Greg Webb VIENNA — Iran has conceded that it provided incorrect information to the U.N. nuclear organization about past experiments involving plutonium, according to a statement delivered today by the organization’s top nuclear safeguards official (see GSN, June 14). At issue was when Iran conducted experiments to separate minute amounts of plutonium from material irradiated in a Tehran facility. Plutonium is one of two materials that can be used to produce nuclear arms, though the amount extracted by Iran was far less than needed for a weapon. Recent tests of Iranian material supplied to the International Atomic Energy Agency showed that the experiments took place in both 1995 and 1998, but Iran had earlier reported that such research stopped in 1993. Pierre Goldschmidt, IAEA deputy director general for safeguards, reported the discrepancy to a quarterly meeting of the agency’s governing board. After receiving evidence of the inaccuracy, Iranian officials admitted late last month that the agency tests were correct. “Iran confirmed the agency’s understanding with regard to the chronology,” Goldschmidt told the board today, according to a text of the statement leaked to the media last night. News of the incorrect Iranian declaration drew criticism from nonproliferation experts who suspect Tehran has nuclear weapons ambitions. “They lied, they definitely lied,” Corey Hinderstein of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington told Global Security Newswire yesterday, dismissing the possibility that Iran had unintentionally misstated the information in earlier declarations. She speculated that Iran had wished to conceal the extent of its interest in producing plutonium. Iranian officials have dismissed such allegations as groundless and belittled Goldschmidt’s statement. “What difference would it make for us to say these tests were made 13 years ago or 10 years ago?” senior Iranian nuclear negotiator Sirus Naseri told the New York Times. “It would make no difference at all, so there cannot be any motive of concealment.” “I’m sorry, it’s not a big story,” he said. Iran has persistently argued that its nuclear activities are strictly peaceful, intended only to create a nuclear power industry. However, plutonium is used far less commonly for nuclear energy than uranium, both of which can be used to construct nuclear weapons. Iranian officials have told that agency that the plutonium separation — also known as “reprocessing” — experiments “were carried out to learn about the nuclear fuel cycle, and to gain experience in reprocessing chemistry,” according to a November report to the board from agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. That explanation had little credibility with another U.S. critic of Iran’s nuclear program. “Some countries have considered recycling plutonium as a fuel for nuclear energy,” said Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department nonproliferation official who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But that’s not why the Iranians are doing it. Presumably they’re looking into extracting plutonium for producing nuclear weapons.” Einhorn has repeatedly cautioned in recent months that Iran might continue to have a clandestine network of nuclear facilities despite its public announcements of transparency. U.S. officials here described Goldschmidt’s statement as a wide-ranging indictment of Iran’s nuclear intentions and reiterated calls for Iran to completely end its atomic activities. Iran must dismantle all of its nuclear fuel cycle activities, U.S. Ambassador Jackie Sanders told the board today, including “at a minimum, all uranium conversion, all uranium enrichment, all heavy water reactor-related activities and any plutonium reprocessing activities.” Goldschmidt’s statement also criticized Iran for failing to provide clarifying information for other parts of the agency’s investigation of the nation’s nuclear program. In particular, he said the agency needed more data to understand the history of Iran’s effort to build more advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges. Iran has told the agency that it did no work on the so-called P-2 centrifuges before 2002, but Goldschmidt told the board that Tehran has not provided “sufficient assurance that no related activities were carried during that period.” In addition, the agency has had difficulty understanding when Iran first received more basic centrifuges, called P-1s, from an illicit nuclear smuggling network once headed by Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. A chronology offered recently by Iran was “not consistent with earlier information,” Goldschmidt said, and “no positive reply has been received thus far” to agency requests for additional detail. Taken together, Goldschmidt’s concerns were “another indication that it’s way too premature to assume that Iran has come back into compliance with its safeguards obligations,” Einhorn said. “This fits a pattern in which Iran is forced to admit to something it tried to conceal and then says, ‘That’s all of it,’ until more information is detected,” he said. “Iran must do more to come clean, but doesn’t seem to have done that,” he added.
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