Iran upgrades uranium enrichment machines
Last updated: February 13, 2013 5:36 pm
James Blitz in London and Monavar Khalaj in Tehran
ft.com
Iran declared on Wednesday that it has started installing a new generation of machines for the faster enrichment of uranium, a move that is likely to annoy western governments and complicate efforts to resolve the decade-old dispute over its nuclear programme.
As Iran prepares to meet world powers later this month for renewed talks over its nuclear programme, the declaration by Iran that it has started installing the new machines at its plant at Natanz, in central Iran, will add to uncertainty over the chances of resolving the impasse.
Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, said that “from last month the installation of the new generation of these machines started”. Although his words will come as no surprise to western diplomats, they are confirmation of a potentially significant step-change in Iran’s capability to produce enriched uranium that might be critical to building a nuclear bomb.
Iran admitted in January that it had plans to install the centrifuge machines – called the IR-2M – which can enrich uranium several times faster than the current model.
Following Mr Abbasi-Davani’s words, western diplomats will now watch how quickly the machines are installed and in what quantity. Iran has indicated that it wants to install about 3,000 machines to produce low enriched uranium at a concentration of 5 per cent at Natanz.
Mark Fitzpatrick, a leading expert on the Iranian programme at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, says Tehran’s plan to install the IR-2M could bring forward the date at which Israel and the US judge Iran to be on the verge of acquiring a nuclear bomb.
“If Iran introduces 3,000 of them, as it said it would, this is a very significant increase of production capacity, maybe of around 50 per cent,” he said.
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