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Iran II: Pilot Uranium Enrichment Facility Under Direct Supervision of Military, Opposition Group Says By Mike Nartker At a press conference yesterday, Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, described the two facilities — the Kolahdouz complex, located between Tehran and the city of Karaj in Northern Iran, and the Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit, located northeast of the city of Yazd. Iran’s uranium mining operation is also located about 125 miles from Yazd, Jafarzadeh said. In the past six months, the Iranian Defense Industry Organization has established a pilot uranium enrichment facility at the Kolahdouz complex, which houses a number of warehouses and workshops used to produce military vehicles, Jafarzadeh said. The pilot facility is housed in one warehouse at the complex, which is hidden among others to avoid attention, he said. The facility already has centrifuge equipment installed there and information indicates that Iran plans to use the facility to conduct enrichment testing, Jafarzadeh said, adding that the experience obtained at this facility will be applied at the main Iranian uranium enrichment site in Natanz. The facility is also meant to supplement the Natanz site in case it is damaged in an attacked, he said. In late May, two senior Iranian military officials hid a number of containers related to the pilot enrichment facility at a second warehouse at the Kolahdouz complex, Jafarzadeh said. He was unable to provide further detail as to the contents of the containers or their purpose, but said that a “great emphasis” has been placed on maintaining the secrecy of the containers’ existence. The pilot enrichment facility located at the Kolahdouz complex is under the direct supervision of the head of the Iranian Defense Industry Organization, Jafarzadeh said. Such direct supervision of a nuclear-related facility by the military counters Tehran’s claims that it pursuing only a civilian nuclear power program, he said. The Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit, scheduled to be completed within two years, is designed to produce uranium concentrate, or “yellowcake,” according to Jafarzadeh. The Iranian Atomic Energy Organization’s nuclear fuel directorate supervises the site, he said. Jafarzadeh said that the council has made its information available to both the Bush administration and the International Atomic Energy Agency. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei arrived in Iran today as part of efforts to attempt to convince Iran to sign the Additional Protocol to its IAEA safeguards agreement, which would allow the agency to conduct more intrusive monitoring of Tehran’s nuclear-related activities, according to Reuters (see related GSN story, today). The council is affiliated with the People’s Mujahedin organization, whose network within Iran provided information on the two facilities, according to Jafarzadeh. The U.S. State Department has formally identified the People’s Mujahedin, also known as Mujahedin-e Khalq, as a terrorist organization. Mujahedin-e Khalq is a Marxist-influenced group that conducted terrorist attacks in the 1970s that killed U.S. military and civilian personnel in Iran has a long history of attacks against the Iranian clerical regime and advocates a secular government, according to a Federation of American Scientists fact sheet. Jafarzadeh defended the council’s credibility, noting the information the group revealed in August 2002 on the Natanz enrichment facility and a heavy water production facility near the city of Arak — information later confirmed by the IAEA. Jafarzadeh also criticized the designation of the People’s Mujahedin as a terrorist organization, saying that the designation was a misguided attempt by the Clinton administration at appeasing the so-called “moderate” regime of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and that such appeasement had only aided Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. According to Jafarzadeh, the Kolahdouz complex site and the Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit are intended for use in a complete nuclear fuel cycle, which Khatami outlined in a speech in February. The first stage of such a cycle would be the mining of uranium near the city of Saghand. The uranium ore would then be sent for processing at the Ardekan site. Then, the uranium concentrate would be sent to a uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, where a number of byproducts needed for uranium enrichment would be created, such as uranium hexaflouride and uranium oxide. Lastly, the uranium concentrate and the byproducts would be transported to Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz for enrichment and fuel pellet production. Iran “is heading all out to gain access to nuclear weapons,” Jafarzadeh said. “The whole purpose behind such an ambitious nuclear weapons program is [to] gain the upper hand in the region, thus creating fear and terror, which would pave the way for reviving the Ottoman Empire and expanding the Iranian clerics’ satanic hegemony in the region,” he said.
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