IRAN SAYS ENRICHING URANIUM TO FIVE PERCENT

TEHRAN:Iran said on Saturday it is now enriching uranium to 5%, after a series of steps back from its commitments under a troubled 2015 accord with major powers.

The deal set a 3.67% limit for uranium enrichment but Iran announced it would no longer respect it after Washington unilaterally abandoned the agreement last year and reimposed crippling sanctions.

“Based on our needs and what we have been ordered, we are currently producing 5%,” Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi told a press conference.

Uranium enrichment is the sensitive process that produces fuel for nuclear power plants but also, in highly extended form, the fissile core for a warhead.

The current 5% level exceeds the limit set by the accord but is less than the 20% Iran had previously operated and far less than the 90% level required for a warhead. In its fourth step away from the agreement, Iran resumed enrichment at the Fordow plant south of Tehran on Thursday, with engineers feeding uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6) into the plant’s mothballed enrichment centrifuges.

Iran was already enriching uranium at another plant in Natanz.

‘INTIMIDATION OF IAEA STAFFER OUTRAGEOUS’

WASHINGTON:US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday slammed Tehran’s treatment of an inspector with the UN’s nuclear watchdog last week as “an outrageous and unwarranted act of intimidation.” The top US diplomat said Iran “detained” the inspector, who the International Atomic Energy Agency has said had been briefly prevented from leaving Iran.