PARIS, 25 March 2005 — The EU is considering an Iranian proposal to allow Tehran to produce enriched uranium on a small scale, despite the bloc’s demand Tehran must abandon the process to guarantee it will not make atom bombs, officials and diplomats said yesterday. Iran made the proposal to be allowed to run a pilot centrifuge project for uranium enrichment at a meeting in Paris Wednesday with EU negotiators Britain, France and Germany, according to a European official who asked not to be named. The pilot plant would have a relatively small number of centrifuges, the machines arranged successively in order to refine out enriched uranium.
Experts have told AFP the idea is to have from 500 to 2,000 centrifuges instead of the 54,000 centrifuges Iran has said it wants to build, an industrial-style arrangement which could produce large amounts of fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but also in highly enriched form the explosive core of atom bombs.
The official said the European trio were “going to look at this (the Iranian proposal) with experts.
