Iran has started to install 6,000 advanced centrifuges at its uranium enrichment facility, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday, an expansion of nuclear work the West fears is aimed at building bombs.
Diplomats in Vienna said last week that Tehran was installing advanced enrichment centrifuges at the underground Natanz facility, accelerating activity that could give Iran the means to make atom bombs in the future if it chose to.
“President Ahmadinejad has announced the start of the installation of 6,000 new centrifuges at Natanz,” state radio and television reported.
“Today the process of installing 6,000 advanced centrifuges started ... I will give further details about them tonight,” the student news agency ISNA quoted Ahmadinejad as saying at Natanz in central Iran, surrounded by anti-aircraft guns.
Ahmadinejad’s announcement is a new snub to the UN Security Council, which since late 2006 has imposed three rounds of sanctions on Tehran for refusing to halt enrichment work.
The president was to give a speech later yesterday in a ceremony in Tehran to celebrate the country’s National Day of Nuclear Technology.
For the second year, the Islamic republic is staging its “national day of nuclear achievement” commemorating the April 2006 anniversary of Iran’s first production of uranium enriched to make atomic fuel.
Ahmadinejad was to attend a ceremony at the headquarters of Iranian state broadcasting in Tehran alongside the head of Iran’s atomic energy organization Gholam Reza Aghazadeh.
Despite the progress made in recent years, Iran is believed to have experienced difficulties in running its existing centrifuges to full capacity.
In its latest report, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declared that “the throughput of the [enrichment] facility has been well below its declared design capacity.”
Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, has said it was “natural in this kind of industry that there are ups and downs once in a while.”
Tehran has repeatedly insisted that it has no intention of making concessions over the key issue of uranium enrichment, leading to deadlock in the standoff with the international community.
“The government rejects any package of incentives that calls for the suspension of enrichment or undermines the Iranian nation’s nuclear rights,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said.
In other developments, former Iranian nuclear negotiator Hossein Moussavian was sentenced to a two-year suspended jail term for having allegedly harmed national security, Fars news agency reported yesterday.
The former No. 2 man in Iran’s National Security Council — the body in charge of nuclear negotiations — was also banned for five years from any official posts, Fars quoted an unnamed official as saying.
Moussavian was arrested last May on charges of “connections to foreign elements and the transfer of information to them.”
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