Iran starts enriching uranium to 60% at Fordo
TEHRAN: Iran has begun producing uranium enriched to 60 percent at its underground Fordo Fuel Enrichment Plant, which was reopened in 2019 after a nuclear agreement with major powers broke down, reports said on Tuesday.
“Iran has started producing uranium enriched to 60 percent at the Fordo plant for the first time,” Tehran’s Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) reported.
An atomic bomb requires uranium enriched to 90 percent, so 60 percent is a significant step toward weapons-grade enrichment.
Iran has always denied any ambition to develop an atomic bomb, insisting that its nuclear activities are for civilian purposes only.
Under a landmark deal struck in 2015, Iran agreed to mothball the Fordo plant and limit its enrichment of uranium to 3.67 percent, which is sufficient for most civilian uses, as part of a package of restrictions on its nuclear activities aimed at preventing it covertly developing a nuclear weapon.
In return, major powers agreed to relax the sanctions they had imposed over Iran’s nuclear program.
But the deal began falling apart in 2018 when then-United States president Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the deal and reimposed crippling economic sanctions.
The following year, Iran began stepping away from its commitments under the deal. It reopened Fordo and started enriching uranium to higher levels.
In January 2021, Iran said it was working to enrich uranium to 20 percent at Fordo. Several months later, another Iranian enrichment plant reached 60 percent purity.
US President Joe Biden has expressed a desire for Washington to return to a revived deal and on-off talks have been underway since April last year.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said late last month he saw little scope to restore the deal, as Iran battled nationwide protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the Islamic republic’s morality police.
Heavily protected Fordo, about 180 kilometers (110 miles) south of the capital Tehran, was built deep underground in a bid to shield it from air or missile strikes by Iran’s enemies.
Archfoe Israel has never ruled out military action if it deems it necessary to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear-weapons capability.
The Jewish state is widely suspected to hold the region’s sole, if undeclared, nuclear arsenal, although it has consistently refused to confirm or deny that it is nuclear-armed.
The implementation of the 2015 deal was overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but the UN watchdog’s relations with Iran have declined sharply in recent months.
The IAEA board of governors passed a resolution last Thursday criticizing Iran for its lack of cooperation.
Iran said on Monday it was taking retaliatory measures against the IAEA over that resolution.
ISNA said the upgrade at Fordo was part of Tehran’s response to that.
“[I]n a second action in response to the resolution, Iran injected (uranium hexafluoride) gas into two IR-2m and IR-4 cascades at the Natanz plant,” it said, referring to an older enrichment facility.