Nuclear proliferation : Iran wants to expand its uranium enrichment capacity

Published 10 July 2014

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday that Iran would need significantly to increase its uranium enrichment capacity for future energy needs, dealing a setback to negotiations between the country and world powers.

Former Iran president Ahmadinejad reviews uranium enrichment facility // Source: vietbao.vn

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Tuesday that Iran would need significantly to increase its uranium enrichment capacity for future energy needs, dealing a setback to negotiations between the country and world powers. Iran and the United States, Russia, France, Germany, China, and Britain have less than two weeks to agree on the future scope of Iran’s enrichment program and other issues if they are to meet a self-imposed 20 July deadline for a deal.

Iran wants to expand its capacity to refine uranium to support a planned network of atomic energy plants, but other members of the negotiating nations insist Iran must reduce its capacity to prevent it from producing a nuclear bomb using highly-enriched uranium.

“Their aim is that we accept a capacity of 10,000 separative work units (SWUs), which is equivalent to 10,000 centrifuges of the older type that we already have. Our officials say we need 190,000 SWU. Perhaps this is not a need this year or in two years or five years, but this is the country’s absolute need,” Khamenei said in a statement published on his website late on Monday. SWUs are a measurement of the effort required to separate isotopes of uranium for use in nuclear power stations or nuclear weapons.

Western diplomats note that Iran had lowered it demands for the size of its future nuclear enrichment program, but Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the non-proliferation program at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said Khamenei’s statement “confirms what I have suspected: that although Iranian negotiators have leeway on some issues, such as transparency and the timeframe for lifting sanctions, they are not authorized to accept cutbacks to the enrichment program.”

Yahoo News reports that Iran has more than 19,000 installed enrichment centrifuges, mostly old-generation IR-1 machines, with about 10,000 of them operating to increase the concentration of uranium fissile isotope U-235. Over the last decade, Iran has significantly expanded its centrifuge capacity, but the country stopped doing so under a 24 November 2013 agreement between Iran and the six nations in exchange for limited sanctions relief.

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