Vienna: Iran has told the United Nations nuclear watchdog it plans to enrich uranium to up to 20 per cent purity, a further breach of the diasarmament deal it started violating in 2019 in retaliation for the sanctions the US reimposed against Tehran.
The move is the latest of several recent announcements by Iran to the International Atomic Energy Agency that it is ramping up its nuclear capacity, which could complicate efforts by US President-elect Joe Biden to rejoin the deal that President Donald Trump abandoned in May 2018.
This step was one of many mentioned in a law passed by Iran’s parliament last month in response to the killing of the country’s top nuclear scientist, which Tehran has blamed on Israel.
“Iran has informed the Agency that in order to comply with a legal act recently passed by the country’s parliament, the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran intends to produce low-enriched uranium (LEU) up to 20 percent at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant,” the UN agency said in a statement.
Fordow was built inside a mountain, apparently to protect it from aerial bombardment, and the 2015 deal does not allow enrichment there.
Iran has breached the deal’s 3.67 per cent limit on the purity to which it can enrich uranium, but it has only gone up to 4.5 per cent so far, well short of the 20 per cent it achieved before the deal and the 90 per cent that is weapons-grade.
Read the article by Francois Murphy in The Age.