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.