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Iran: Uranium Mining, Reprocessing, Could Lead to Nuclear Weapons By David McGlinchey The effort described by officials could give Iran the ability to enrich uranium to weapon-grade levels or to produce plutonium, an element created during the operation of nuclear reactors. “Iran’s ambitious and costly pursuit of a complete nuclear fuel cycle only makes sense if it’s in support of a nuclear weapons program,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said yesterday. An Iranian program to produce fresh fuel and enrich uranium “would give them the option to make weapon-grade uranium,” Frank von Hippel chairman of the Federation of American Scientists and a Princeton University professor, told Global Security Newswire today. The Associated Press yesterday quoted Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, as saying that Tehran hopes “to process the spent fuel and provide fuel for plants inside the country soon.” Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency today reported that a facility in the central city of Isfahan would process the uranium into “yellow cake,” the final stage before nuclear fuel pellets are produced. Despite scheduled development assistance from China, that factory was built with domestic resources, according to an IRNA report. “Reaching the production phase of the factory producing the ‘Yellow Cake’ … that produces the main substance needed in manufacturing nuclear fuel, is in itself a great scientific achievement of eventful significance,” said Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Officials repeated yesterday’s assertion that Iran is producing the uranium only for energy purposes. “The Islamic Republic’s policy is clear: We want the nuclear know-how, but we are not interested in the proliferation of arms,” Aghazadeh said. Mohamed ElBaradei, the U.N. atomic agency’s director general, has pushed his visit to Iran up a few days, to Feb. 22, and plans to meet with Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, according to a report today from Agence France-Presse. IAEA officials said, however, that they were not surprised by yesterday’s announcement. An agency official visited Iran’s uranium mine in 1992, according to IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming. “We have been aware of this mine and the intentions of Iran to exploit it,” Fleming said. Russian Nuclear Cooperation While Moscow has agreed to supply nuclear fuel for the light-water reactor it is building for Iran at Bushehr, Tehran’s plans to develop its own uranium source will circumvent its obligation to return Bushehr’s spent fuel to Russia, Boucher said (see GSN, Dec. 16, 2002). “It puts a goodly part of the nuclear fuel cycle outside of the control of whoever’s providing the reactor and the fuel. The agreement as we understood it … had been that Russia would provide the fuel and take it back after it was used in the reactor,” Boucher said. A planned Iranian-built nuclear reactor might be a heavy-water facility, from which plutonium can be produced more easily, according to von Hippel. “The situation is far from clear, but certainly ought to supply the [United States] with new arguments to persuade Russia to end its nuclear cooperation with Iran,” von Hippel said.
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