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Iran resumes conversion; 'Decision is irreversible'

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Thursday, August 11, 2005

Iran has formally resumed uranium conversion despite warnings by the European Union and the United States.

Officials said uranium conversion began Monday, hours after inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency installed surveillance equipment at the facility, protected by anti-aircraft batteries and also located underground.

The IAEA confirmed the renewal of uranium conversion, Middle East Newsline reported.

"We are restarting work in Isfahan stage by stage as technical work requires to do so," Iranian Atomic Energy Organization deputy director Mohammed Saidi said on Monday. "Today, we restarted work for production of AUC [ammonium uranyl carbonate]."

"The decision is irreversible," Saidi said.

The official Iranian news agency, Irna, said yellowcake, or raw uranium, was taken into a room for injection, sampling "and other reprocessing activities." Irna said the Isfahan facility would soon convert yellowcake into uranium tetrafluoride, or UF-4, the first stage toward the production of uranium hexafluoride, or UF-6. UF-6 is a gas used for uranium enrichment, a key element in the assembly of nuclear weapons.

The renewal of uranium conversion came on the eve of an IAEA board of governors session to discuss Iran's decision to end its suspension of uranium enrichment. Teheran agreed to a temporary suspension as part of negotiations with Britain, France and Germany, which offered significant economic and nuclear assistance.

The IAEA said uranium conversion began before the testing of the agency's surveillance equipment, a process that usually takes 24 hours.

"IAEA director-general Mohamed El Baradei informed members of the board of governors that Iran today started to feed uranium ore concentrate into the first part of the process line at the uranium conversion facility," the IAEA said in a statement. "It should be noted that the sealed parts of the process line remain intact."

Saidi said that by Aug. 10 the agency would remove the seals in the unit where UF-4 would be converted into UF-6. The UF-6 gas could then be fed into centrifuges for enrichment.

Officials said that so far Isfahan would be the only Iranian nuclear facility where uranium conversion would take place. Until 2004, Iran was said to have enriched uranium with gas centrifuges at Natanz.

"We won't restart work in Natanz for now," Saidi said. "We hope we will reach a logical conclusion in talks with Europeans."

In Vienna, the National Council of Resistance of Iran said it obtained an Iranian government classified document that reported Teheran's success in advancing its nuclear program while the United States was fighting the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. The document termed Teheran's two years of negotiations with the EU a "major achievement" and reported the operation of thousands of centrifuges in secret locations.

"We thwarted U.S. efforts to accuse Iran of noncompliance," Farid Soleimani, a senior member of the Iranian opposition, quoted the document as saying.


Copyright © 2005 East West Services, Inc.

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