IRAN HAS FIRED UP UNDERGROUND CENTRIFUGES: IAEA.
Operating centrifuges underground
VIENNA • Iran has fired up advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges that it had installed underground at its Natanz site, in the latest breach of its nuclear deal with major powers, a report by the UN atomic watchdog obtained by Reuters on Wednesday showed.
Natanz is Iran's main uranium-enrichment site and the one that U.S. President Donald Trump recently asked for options on attacking, according to a source who confirmed a New York Times report.
The deal states that Iran can only accumulate enriched uranium with first-generation IR-1 machines and that those are the only centrifuges it can operate at its underground plant at Natanz, apparently built to withstand aerial bombardment.
An International Atomic Energy Agency report last week showed Tehran had installed a cascade, an interlinked cluster, of advanced IR- 2m machines underground at Natanz, having moved them from an aboveground plant where it was already enriching uranium with advanced centrifuges in breach of the deal.
Last week's report said it had not fed uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas, the feedstock for centrifuges, into that cascade.
“On 14 November 2020, the Agency verified that Iran began feeding UF6 into the recently installed cascade of 174 IR-2M centrifuges at the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) in Natanz,” the IAEA report to member states dated Tuesday said.
Iran has breached many restrictions imposed by the 2015 deal on its atomic activities, including on the purity to which it enriches uranium and its stock of enriched uranium. These breaches came in response to Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 and the reimposition of U. S. sanctions against Tehran that had been lifted under the accord.
Last week's IAEA report said Iran had also begun installing a cascade of IR-4 centrifuges at the underground plant but not a planned third cascade of IR-6 machines. It is also operating 5,060 IR-1 machines at the plant.
Also Wednesday, the IAEA and the United States pressured Iran to finally explain the origin of uranium particles found almost two years ago at an old but undeclared site that Israel has called a “secret atomic warehouse.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew attention to the Turqazabad site in Tehran in a speech to the United Nations in September 2018, urging the IAEA to visit it. Iran called it a carpet-cleaning facility.
IAEA inspectors went there in February 2019 and took environmental samples that showed traces of processed uranium. The watchdog has been seeking answers on where those traces came from ever since; it says only part of Iran's explanations have held water.