The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog said on Monday Iran has started using a second set of 164 centrifuges linked in a cascade, or string of machines, to enrich uranium to up to 20 percent at its Natanz pilot fuel enrichment plant.
Another cascade there has been producing uranium enriched to near 20 percent since February.
If enriched to around 95 percent, uranium can be used in building a nuclear bomb. At 20 percent, it can be turned into weapons-grade material much more quickly than less-enriched uranium.
Tehran denies it has such aims and says its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes only. But some in the international community — the United States and its allies — aren’t convinced.
IAEA spokeswoman Gill Tudor said that when agency inspectors visited the facility on July 17, “Iran was feeding nuclear material to the two interconnected 164-machine centrifuge cascades.” This, she added, was «contrary to UN Security Council resolutions affirming that Iran should suspend all enrichment related activities.” The UN Security Council imposed a fourth round of sanctions on Iran in June because of its refusal to halt uranium enrichment. Tougher unilateral US and European Union sanctions followed in July. Iran had informed the IAEA in March of its intentions to link the two cascades, Tudor said.
The move upgrades the efficiency of production by recycling the waste now being left by the first cascade to squeeze out more enriched uranium at near 20-percent levels, diplomats said in May when they disclosed to The Associated Press that Iranian technicians had assembled the second 164-centrifuge cascade and appeared ready to activate it.
One of the diplomats familiar with Iran’s enrichment programs emphasized at the time that the idea appeared not to produce greater amounts than the first operating cascade was turning out, but to improve productivity.
The IAEA’s comments on Monday came as Iran announced plans to get rid of its dollar and euro reserves in response to the latest UN sanctions over its contested nuclear program.
“To fight sanctions, we will remove the dollar and euro from our foreign exchange basket and will replace them with (the Iranian) rial and the currency of any country cooperating with us,” Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi told Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency. “We consider these currencies (dollar and euro) dirty and won’t sell oil in dollar and euro,” he added.
Earlier on Monday, a German lawmaker who recently visited Tehran said Iranian officials fear the country’s international trade will suffer from the latest round of sanctions.
Meanwhile, Iran’s new ambassador to Iraq is promising that trade between the one-time rivals will double in the “near future,” even as his country is under stringent sanctions. Hassan Dannaie Fir told reporters on Tuesday that Iraq is a «fertile market» for Iranian goods.
Trade between the two neighbors stands at about $7 billion per year.
