Inspectors from the United Nations nuclear watchdog found uranium particles enriched up to 83.7% in Iran’s underground Fordo nuclear site, according to a confidential quarterly report seen by AP.
A spokesman for Iran’s civilian nuclear program, Behrouz Kamalvandi, sought last week to portray any detection of uranium particles enriched to that level as a momentary side effect of trying to reach a finished product of 60% purity. However, experts say such a great variance in the purity even at the atomic level would appear suspicious to inspectors.
Iran has been producing uranium enriched to 60% purity — a level for which nonproliferation experts already say Tehran has no civilian use. Any accusation of enrichment higher than that further ratchets up tension over the program. , it likely would take months more to build a weapon and potentially miniaturize it to put it on a missile. The U.S. intelligence community, as recently as this past weekend, has maintained its assessment that Iran isn’t pursuing an atomic bomb.
But Fordo, which sits under a mountain near the holy Shiite city of Qom, some 90 kilometers southwest of Tehran, remains a special concern for the international community. It is about the size of a football field, large enough to house 3,000 centrifuges, but small and hardened enough to lead U.S. officials to suspect it had a military purpose when they exposed the site publicly in 2009.Any explanation from Iran, however, likely won’t be enough to satisfy Israel, Iran’s regional archrival.
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