IranÂ’s top nuclear official said on Thursday that UN sanctions would not restrict its atomic programme, and that it was continuing to amass the raw material for uranium enrichment.
The UN Security Council voted unanimously on December 23 to impose sanctions on Iran’s trade in sensitive nuclear materials and technology in an attempt to stop enrichment work that could produce the material for nuclear explosives. “They (the West) should accept that this (nuclear work) is our national right and is irreversible,” Gholamreza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, was quoted as saying by the student news agency ISNA. “This technology is Iranian-made and cannot be limited by sanctions.”
Analysts say that to achieve its goal of “industrial-scale” enrichment with 54,000 centrifuge enrichment machines - only around 350 are known to be operating experimentally so far - Iran may still need to acquire equipment abroad. Aghazadeh said Iran had now stockpiled 250 tonnes of uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6), the feedstock that is injected into centrifuges for enrichment into fuel. “Today we have produced more than 250 tonnes of UF6, kept in tunnels that are almost unique in the world,” he said. |