Iran said yesterday it was considering plans to start building two new uranium enrichment plants from next month, with the sites concealed in the mountains to avert air strikes.
The announcement from Iran’s atomic chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, came just days after the UN nuclear watchdog raised concerns that Tehran could be building a nuclear warhead.
“Inshallah [God willing], in the next Iranian year [starting next month] as ordered by the president [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad], we may start the construction of two new enrichment sites,” Salehi told ISNA news agency.
He said the enrichment capacities of the new sites would be similar to the existing facility in the central city of Natanz, where Tehran is refining uranium despite three sets of UN sanctions.
The latest UN nuclear watchdog report said Iran has installed in Natanz 8,610 centrifuges, the device which rotates at supersonic speed to enrich uranium.
Of these, 3,772 centrifuges are actively enriching uranium under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Iranian officials maintain Natanz has an annual capacity to produce about 30 tonnes of enriched uranium. The IAEA said Iran currently has an estimated 2,065kg of low-enriched uranium.
Salehi said the new plants will be equipped with new generation centrifuges and the facilities would be hidden in mountains so as to protect them from “any attacks.”
Washington and its ally Israel have not ruled out military strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites in a bid to stop its galloping atomic program.
Iran is building its second uranium enrichment facility inside a mountain near the Shiite holy city of Qom, a development for which it was strongly rebuked by world powers late last year.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called yesterday for an immediate embargo on Iran’s energy sector, saying the UN Security Council should be sidestepped if it cannot agree on the move.
Netanyahu told foreign Jewish leaders that if the world “is serious about stopping Iran, then what it needs to do is not watered-down sanctions, moderate sanctions ... but effective, biting sanctions that curtail the import and export of oil into Iran.”
“This is what is required now. It may not do the job, but nothing else will, and at least we will have known that it was tried. And if this cannot pass in the Security Council, then it should be done outside the Security Council, but immediately,” he said.
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