Iran Builds Nuclear Fuel Fabrication Site

Iran has made progress on a nuclear fuel fabrication facility that could enable the nation to manufacture fuel rods next year, the nation’s top nuclear official said Friday (see GSN, April 20).

Workers at the Isfahan site have completed work on a plant to produce zirconium tubes to house nuclear fuel rods, and a facility to make fuel pellets should be ready next year, said Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

“The factory for producing the tubes has been brought into service in Isfahan,” he said.  “And next year the plant for producing the nuclear fuel pellets will begin work.”

More attention has been paid recently to Iran’s efforts to build uranium enrichment centrifuges, a process that will require several more years to complete, Aghazadeh said (see GSN, April 19).

“We have reached the industrial stage, but we need several years to create an industrial unit capable of producing fuel for our power stations,” he said.  “We must install 50,000 centrifuges to be able to provide the fuel for two nuclear stations” (Agence France-Presse I/Yahoo!News, April 20).

European diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to freeze its enrichment program are set to resume this week.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said he would meet Wednesday with top Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani in Ankara, Turkey.

“I expect to begin resumption of the talks that we left some time ago to see if we can move towards negotiations,” Solana told reporters in Luxembourg.  The meeting would be the first since the U.N. Security Council imposed an enhanced set of sanctions against Iran last month (see GSN, March 26; Reuters/New York Times, April 23).

Iran, however, indicated yesterday that it would not suspend its enrichment activities.

“Halting uranium enrichment is definitely deleted from the literature of Iran's nuclear activities,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters yesterday in Tehran.  “In our negotiations the halting of this activity has not been on the table and going back on time is not envisaged” (Stuart Williams, Agence France-Presse II/Yahoo!News, April 22).

Meanwhile, Iranian and Russian officials have made headway toward resolving a financial dispute over the completion of a Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, April 11).

Officials signed a protocol yesterday that eliminated some, but not all of the hurdles preventing the reactor’s completion.

“If the financing plan is successfully implemented, a portion of the questions on the financing of Iran's first atomic power station plant will be removed,” said Irina Yesipova, spokeswoman for Russian nuclear construction agency Atomstroiexport (Associated Press/International Herald Tribune, April 22).

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