An Iranian official confirmed yesterday that the country has stepped up its nuclear activities, following a report from the UN atomic agency that said Iran has accelerated uranium enrichment.
"Iran has started another stage of injecting hexafluoride gas into centrifuge machines," the student news agency ISNA quoted an unnamed official as saying.
"Iran is also pursuing a plan to have a 3,000-centrifuge cascade by the end of the current year (March next year)," he noted, adding that all the material used in uranium enrichment facilities has been produced domestically.
A report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) obtained by reporters on Thursday said that Iran had accelerated uranium enrichment on Tuesday, the same day world powers asked it to halt the work and open talks to guarantee it would not make nuclear weapons.
On that Tuesday, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana visited Tehran to present a package of benefits aimed at enticing Iran to suspend uranium enrichment.
Enriched uranium makes nuclear reactor fuel, and in a highly refined form can produce atom bomb material.
"Iran is continuing its installation work on other 164-machine cascades," said the report from IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei.
Iran built the cascade as a pilot plant for what it hopes will eventually be an industrial plant of more than 50,000 centrifuges, used to refine the uranium 235 isotope.
Iran started last August to make feedstock uranium hexafluoride gas, which it then fed into centrifuges in February this year. It produced enriched uranium beginning in April.
The quality of enriched uranium being produced in April was appropriate for nuclear reactor fuel and was not the highly enriched variety needed to make weapons.
Meanwhile, a senior Iranian official warned countries yesterday to show "self-restraint" at a high-level meeting of the atomic agency next week and not endanger the diplomacy engaged over Tehran's nuclear program.
"We expect everybody will have self-restraint," Iran's ambassador to the atomic agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said about the meeting of the agency's 35-nation board of governors which is scheduled to start in Vienna on Monday.
Soltanieh warned that the IAEA board members "should be careful that this diplomacy will work."
The IAEA has often been a forum for the US and key European countries, which are among those proposing the benefits package, to attack Iran for hiding sensitive nuclear work.
Soltanieh said Iran has a "positive approach" to new talks and that nothing should happen at the board "to affect this more or less positive environment."
There should be a "smooth meeting and let the thing go," said Soltanieh, referring to letting diplomacy take its course.
Diplomats from IAEA member states said they did not expect any fireworks in Vienna next week.
Soltanieh said it was a "coincidence" and not meant as a provocation that Iran restarted crucial enrichment work on the same day that Solana presented the incentives package from the six world powers in Tehran on Tuesday.
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