Iran Plans to Extract Uranium from Mine in 2006

Iran is less than two years away from extracting uranium from the country’s Saghand mine, the Associated Press reported Sunday.

“We will be able to extract uranium ore in the first half of 2006 from Saghand mine. More than 77 percent of the work has been accomplished,” said Ghasem Soleimani of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.

The mine has a capacity of 132,000 tons of uranium ore per year, according to the AP. The United States and its allies worry that Iran’s mastery of the entire nuclear fuel cycle would lead to development of nuclear weapons (Ali Akbar Dareini, Associated Press/Chicago Sun-Times, Sept. 5).

Iran’s fuel cycle capability was described last week in a quarterly report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is conducting a review of the program.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog said that Iran was cooperating with many aspects of an investigation into its nuclear programs but was moving ahead with some sensitive nuclear work over the objections of the agency’s board.

Iran’s new nuclear activity appears certain to fuel new calls by the United States for tougher measures against Tehran, which Washington alleges is seeking nuclear weapons. The board is set to begin its next meeting Monday at IAEA headquarters in Vienna.

In an Aug. 14 letter, Iran told the U.N. agency it was about to start “hot tests” that would generate uranium hexafluoride, a compound of choice for enrichment to weapon-grade forms of uranium. Iran said it would introduce 37 metric tons of raw uranium into its Uranium Conversion Facility during the tests, which were to begin Aug. 19.

Indicating a possible use of the uranium hexafluoride, diplomats told the Associated Press last week that Iran has told the agency it plans, possibly as early as next month, to introduce a “substance” into its Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) at Natanz.

Iran has also resumed making components for uranium-enrichment centrifuges and assembling and testing the centrifuges. By the middle of last month, the country had shown the agency about 70 newly assembled and tested centrifuge rotors, according to last week’s report.

At its last meeting, held in June, the board called on Iran to suspend all enrichment- and reprocessing-related activity, including production of uranium hexafluoride and of centrifuge components. Following a test in May and June at the Uranium Conversion Facility on a smaller scale than the one mentioned in the Aug. 14 letter, the panel specifically asked the country to reconsider its intention to conduct tests at the facility.

Iran promised in December 2003 to suspend enrichment and reprocessing and said in February of this year that the suspension extended to centrifuge-component production. In May, however, the country foreshadowed the contents of last week’s report by saying it had never promised not to produce feed material for enrichment and that its suspension did not apply to uranium hexafluoride production.

Former Iranian envoy in Vienna Ali Akbar Salehi told AP last week that the agency has long known of Iran’s plans to use the Uranium Conversion Facility and that the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant is not suitable for producing nuclear-weapon material.

“To produce a bomb, you need vast facilities, including thousands of advanced centrifuges, cascaded in a special pattern, to work for a long time to produce enough weapons-grade enriched uranium,” Salehi told AP. “The equipment at Natanz can’t do that, and IAEA cameras there watch the facility 24 hours a day.”

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters last week that Washington would continue at next week’s meeting to press for a referral to the U.N. Security Council.

“Whether there is a consensus to do that now remains to be seen,” AP quoted Powell as saying, “but we think we’ve seen enough. The world should have seen enough over the last year to come to the conclusion that it’s time for it to be referred to the Security Council.”

Led by the United States, the IAEA board’s members are almost certain at least to condemn Iran’s new activities.

For the first time in the current investigation, however, the report also vindicated Iran on several important questions — potentially bolstering the comparatively conciliatory position of countries such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom, which together obtained an Iranian promise late last year to suspend enrichment activities.

The development further emboldened Iran in its usual declarations of innocence and jabs at the United States.

“We believe there is today no ambiguity in Iran’s file at the IAEA, or, if there is any, it is over very minute and insignificant matters,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said last week, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. “We hope the remaining minute issues, too, would be resolved speedily in near future, although some parties keep making hue and cry over the issue and try to create a chaotic atmosphere.”

The agency termed it “plausible” that Tehran is being truthful in claiming enriched-uranium particles found at certain sites are not the result of domestic production (Joe Fiorill, Global Security Newswire, Sept. 7). 

The agency has found that Pakistan was the source of Iran’s centrifuge designs and equipment, the New York Times reported last week.

A diplomatic source indicated that the designs came from the laboratories of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

“What Iran got came almost entirely from one country,” said a senior international diplomat who was briefed on the findings. “And it seems to point directly back to Pakistan’s own laboratories” (David Sanger, New York Times, Sept. 2).

The IAEA probe also yielded findings the agency called “consistent” with Iran’s statements on uranium-conversion and laser-enrichment programs.

On the question of centrifuge enrichment of uranium, the agency said it has verified that Iran has not operated or tested centrifuges at the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant, has not introduced new material into centrifuges at the facility and has installed no new centrifuges at the facility or at a related site.

The agency has also confirmed that no reprocessing has taken place at another site, the Jabr ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories.

“Although the agency is not yet in a position to draw definitive conclusions concerning the correctness and completeness of Iran’s declarations related to all aspects of its nuclear program,” the agency said in the report, “it continues to make steady progress in understanding the program.”

“In this regard, the agency’s investigations have reached a point where, with respect to two aspects previously identified by the agency as requiring investigation (i.e. Iran’s declared laser-enrichment activities and Iran’s declared uranium-conversion experiments), further follow-up will be carried out as a routine safeguards implementation matter,” it said (Fiorill, Global Security Newswire).

European Union foreign ministers, however, expressed concern Friday over Iran’s nuclear plans and called on the Islamic republic to cooperate more fully with the agency, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We agreed upon the need to send out a strong signal to Iran to cooperate with the IAEA and to provide the necessary information as requested by its director general Mr. (Mohamed) ElBaradei,” said Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot, whose country holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

He said the union was “pessimistic” about the situation, noting recent “regrettable developments” in the matter.

“I think this is exactly the reason why we are looking at the measures that can be taken to make quite clear to the regime that we cannot accept certain things,” said Bot (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, Sept. 3).

Iran announced Sunday that it would send national security chief Hassan Rohani to Europe in order to forestall U.S. efforts to have the Islamic republic called before the Security Council, AFP reported.

“Currently, we are in very sensitive discussions with the Europeans. Tomorrow Mr. Rohani will go to the Netherlands to meet with Dutch officials,” Asefi said (AFP/Yahoo!News, Sept. 5).

The IAEA report indicates Iranian explanations “do not provide sufficient assurance” that Iran’s effort to use powerful P-2 centrifuges to enrich uranium was dormant between 1995 and 2002, as the country claims.

The watchdog added that several questions remain unanswered in its investigation into low-enriched uranium (LEU) and highly enriched uranium (HEU) particles found at four Iranian sites. Iran maintains the particles came from imported centrifuge components, not domestic enrichment activity.

Three main questions remain unanswered with regard to the uranium, according to the report: “why, if the contamination of the domestically manufactured centrifuge components was due solely to contamination from the imported components, the domestic components showed predominantly LEU contamination, while the imported components showed both LEU and HEU contamination; why, if the source of contamination is the same (imported components), the contamination at PFEP differed from that found at the Kalaye Electric Co. workshop and Farayand Technique; why 36 percent uranium 235 (U-235) particles were found mainly in three of the locations where the imported components were located and not at others and why, at the Kalaye Electric Co. workshop, there was a relatively large number of particles of 36 percent U-235, compared to the number of particles of U-235 with other enrichment levels.”

Another sensitive question at the panel’s June meeting was Iran’s razing this year of buildings at the Lavisan-Shian site in Tehran, a move Iran’s critics alleged was intended to conceal illicit nuclear activity.

Last week’s report indicates Iran told the agency it demolished the buildings, part of a “physics research center” run by the Defense Ministry, because of a decision to give the land back to the city government. “Iran recently provided documentation to support this explanation,” the report reads.

Iran told the agency the center’s purposes were “preparedness to combat and neutralization of casualties due to nuclear attacks and accidents (nuclear defense), and also support and provide scientific advice to the Ministry of Defense.” The country added that “no nuclear material declarable in accordance with the agency’s safeguard(s) was present” and that “no nuclear material and nuclear activities related to fuel cycle (were) carried out in Lavisan-Shian.”

IAEA inspectors have taken environmental samples at the site in a bid to verify Iran’s explanation (Fiorill, Global Security Newswire).

Back to top
About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines © Copyright 2008 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.