IRAN has activated equipment to enrich uranium more efficiently. The move defies the UN Security Council, the International Atomic Energy Agency says.
The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog yesterday said Iran had started using a second set of 164 centrifuges linked in a cascade, or string of machines, to enrich uranium to up to 20 per cent at its Natanz pilot fuel-enrichment plant.
Another cascade there has been producing uranium enriched to near 20 per cent since February. If enriched to about 95 per cent, uranium can be used in building a nuclear bomb. At 20 per cent, 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 US and its allies — are not 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 EU sanctions followed last month.
Iran had informed the IAEA in March of its intentions to link the two cascades, Ms 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 per cent levels.
The IAEA’s comments yesterday came as Iran announced plans to get rid of its US dollar and euro reserves in response to the latest UN sanctions.
“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 co-operating with us,” Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi told Iran’s Fars news agency.
“We consider these currencies (dollar and euro) dirty and won’t sell oil in dollar and euro.”
The new UN resolution seeks to crack down on the problem of evading sanctions and establishes a group of experts to gather information and analyse countries’ efforts to implement them.
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