VIENNA – Adding weight to its announcement of a nuclear upgrade, Tehran has shown U.N. officials high-tech equipment positioned at its main uranium enrichment site meant to vastly accelerate output of material that can be used for both reactor fuel and atomic arms, a senior envoy said Thursday.
The diplomat spoke shortly after the officials returned from Tehran, acknowledging that their latest in a series of trips to the Iranian capital again failed to reach a deal to restart a probe into suspicions that Iran is pursuing nuclear arms.
Herman Naeckerts, who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency team that visited Iran, said “remaining differences” scuttled attempts to finalize an agreement on how such an investigation should be conducted.
With expectations for success low even before the start of the latest negotiating attempt, interest focused on Iran’s move to install a new generation of centrifuges at Natanz, its main uranium enriching site southeast of Tehran.
Iran announced the start of installations during the IAEA team’s one-day visit Wednesday at about the same time that the diplomat said the group was shown “a small number” of the machines at the site. The diplomat said those centrifuges were ready to be installed. The new centrifuges can enrich uranium four to five times faster than Iran’s present working model.
Announcing plans to upgrade last month, Iran indicated that it could add over 3,000 of the new centrifuges to the more than 10,000 older models it has at Natanz turning out low-enriched, fuel-grade uranium. About 700 of the old machines at Fordo, another site, are churning out higher-enriched material that is still below weapons-grade.