VIENNA, 14 July 2007 — UN nuclear inspectors banned earlier this year by Iran from visiting a heavy water reactor will now be allowed to inspect it before the end of July, the International Atomic Energy Agency said yesterday.
In a further sign of compromise on the part of Iran, the IAEA said that Tehran also had agreed to answer questions on past experiments that the international community fears could be linked to a weapons program.
The IAEA, the UN’s nuclear monitor, said Iran promised the concessions earlier this week in a meeting between its officials and a senior delegation from the Vienna-based agency.
Years of Iranian stonewalling have left the IAEA unable to ascertain whether Tehran is telling the truth in asserting that it has no nuclear weapons ambitions and that its atomic activities are meant strictly to generate power.
Its refusal to cooperate with the agency was the trigger that prompted UN Security Council involvement last year and led to two sets of sanctions.
Any decision by Iran to cooperate with the agency would be a major concession on its part. As such, it could weaken a push by the United States and its Western allies on the Council to impose new UN sanctions — even if Tehran continues to defy the Council’s main demand that it freeze its uranium enrichment program.
In talks between Iranian officials and IAEA Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen, “agreement was reached on... a visit of agency inspectors to the heavy water research reactor at Arak by the end of July,” said an IAEA statement.
The two sides also agreed on how “to resolve remaining issues regarding Iran’s past plutonium experiments,” appointing new inspectors in the place of those banned by Iran earlier this year, finalizing ways of fuller IAEA supervision of uranium enrichment activities, “clarifying the open issues associated with the... content of Iran’s enrichment program,” said the statement.
Those “open issues” include “uranium contamination found on equipment at a specific location,” said the agency, alluding to traces of enriched uranium at a military site — which could indicate links to a weapons program — as “well as studies related to specified projects,” again shorthand for nuclear work that could have military applications.
Key to any IAEA overview of Iran’s nuclear activities is access to the site of the Arak heavy water research reactor because it will produce plutonium once completed sometime in the next decade.
Because plutonium and enriched uranium can be used as the fissile core of warheads, the Security Council demanded a stop not only to enrichment but also to construction at the Arak project as well as full openness on more than two decades of nuclear activities that went undetected until revealed by an Iranian dissident group four years ago.
Iran has refused both the demands on enrichment and stopping construction of Arak. A decision to lift its ban on allowing inspectors to tour the site would signal its readiness to again put a key component of its nuclear program under international purview after months of keeping it off limits.
Questions about plutonium experiments go back to the discovery by agency inspectors of secret experiments in the mid-1990s and their findings that not all plutonium Iran said it had possessed is accounted for, as well as newer, unexplained traces of plutonium and enriched uranium found last year at a nuclear waste facility.
