TEHRAN —
Iran said Tuesday it had begun producing uranium enriched to 60 percent at its
Fordo plant, an underground facility that reopened three years ago amid the
breakdown of its nuclear deal with major powers.
اضافة اعلان
The move was part
of Iran’s response to the UN nuclear watchdog’s adoption last week of a censure
motion drafted by Western governments accusing it of non-cooperation.
“Iran has started
producing uranium enriched to 60 percent at the Fordo plant for the first
time,” Iran’s ISNA news agency reported, a development then confirmed by
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran chief Mohammad Eslami.
An atomic bomb
requires uranium enriched to 90 percent, so 60 percent is a significant step
towards weapons-grade enrichment.
Iran has always
denied any ambition to develop an atomic bomb, insisting its nuclear activities
are for civilian purposes only.
Under a landmark
deal struck in 2015, Iran agreed to mothball the Fordo plant and limit its
enrichment of uranium to 3.67 percent, sufficient for most civilian uses, as
part of a package of restrictions on its nuclear activities aimed at preventing
it covertly developing a nuclear weapon.
In return, major
powers agreed to relax sanctions they had imposed over Iran’s nuclear program.
But the deal began
falling apart in 2018 when then US president Donald Trump pulled Washington out
of the agreement and reimposed crippling economic sanctions.
Protests cloud nuclear talks
The following year, Iran began stepping away from its commitments under
the deal. It reopened the Fordo plant and starting enriching uranium to higher
levels.
In January 2021,
Iran said it was working to enrich uranium to 20 percent at Fordo. Several
months later another Iranian enrichment plant reached 60 percent.
President
Joe Biden has expressed a desire for Washington to return to a revived deal and on-off
talks have been underway since April last year.
Secretary of State
Antony Blinken said late last month that he saw little scope to restore the
deal, as Iran battles nationwide protests sparked by the September death in
morality police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman.
The heavily
protected Fordo plant around 180km south of Tehran was built deep underground
in a bid to shield it from air or missiles strikes by Iran’s enemies.
Response to IAEA censure
The implementation of the 2015 deal was overseen by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) but the UN watchdog’s relations with Iran have
declined sharply in recent months.
The IAEA board of
governors passed a resolution on Thursday criticizing Iran for its lack of
cooperation.
“We warned that
political pressure and resolutions wouldn’t change anything and that the
adoption of a resolution would draw a serious response,” said Eslami.
“That’s why the
production of uranium enriched to 60 percent began at Fordo from Monday.”
The ISNA news
agency said that the step at Fordo was one part of Iran’s response.
“As well, in a
second action in response to the resolution, Iran injected (uranium
hexafluoride) gas into two IR-2m and IR-4 cascades at the Natanz plant,” it
said, referring to an older enrichment facility.
The UN watchdog has
been pressing Iran to explain the discovery of traces of nuclear material at
three sites it had not declared, a key sticking point that led to the adoption
of an earlier censure motion by the IAEA in June.
In a report seen by
AFP earlier this month, the IAEA said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium
stood at 3,673.7kg as of October 22, a decrease of 267.2kg from the last
quarterly report.
This included
significant stockpiles of uranium enriched to higher levels — 386.4kg to 20
percent and 62.3kg to 60 percent.
The IAEA complains
that the ability of its inspectors to monitor Iran’s stepped up nuclear
activities has been hampered by restrictions imposed by Iran.
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