Iran's Nuclear Chief Says Uranium Enrichment 'More Than Doubled'
Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium has more than doubled, the country’s nuclear chief Mohammad Eslami told lawmakers in Tehran on Saturday.
Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium has more than doubled, the country’s nuclear chief Mohammad Eslami told lawmakers in Tehran on Saturday.
Eslami referred to a parliament bill passed in December 2020 that required the government to increase high-level enrichment of uranium, demanding that the United States lift all sanctions. Praising the legislation, Eslami said that the decision made possible an unprecedented enrichment capacity.
In November 2020, Iran’s parliament with a hardliner majority - many officers of the Revolutionary Guard - initiated the legislation and passed it in early December, right after newly elected US president Joe Biden signaled his readiness to return the United States to the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran known as the JCPOA.
His predecessor Donald Trump had abandoned the accord in 2018 calling it a “bad deal” and imposing sanctions on Iran.
In early 2021, the Islamic Republic began enriching uranium to 20-percent and shortly after to 60-percent, a short step from acquiring highly enriched fissile material for a nuclear bomb. According to estimates, it now has enough enriched uranium for one atomic bomb.
Eslami claimed that Iran’s nuclear program has led to production of energy and has saved “a lot of money” and reduced fossil fuel consumption.
His claims, however, are refuted by the fact that only a small fraction of Iran’s electricity is produced by its only reactor at Bushehr, while highly enriched uranium is not needed for nuclear power plants, which is not the subject of the dispute with the West.
Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran (AEOI) and a vice-president, told journalists the project, known also as the ‘Kanun’ plant due to its proximity to the river, was “important and necessary” for the south west of Iran. He said work was beginning with preparing the site for construction of a 300-megawatt (MW) plant.
Plans for Darkhovin go back to days before the 1979 Revolution, when Shah Reza Pahlavi agreed with France the construction of two 910-MW reactors on the site. In 1992 then president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on a visit to Beijing agreed a plan with China, against United States objections, to sell two 300-MW reactors for Darkhovin, but the Chinese subsequently withdrew, apparently due to continuing pressure from Washington.
Iran did sign up Zurich-based ABB as a consultant, but the Swiss-Swedish robotics and power multinational withdrew more than once before finally quitting in 2018 as the US introduced ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions threatening punitive action against any entity having banking dealings with Iran.
Eslami, making an oblique reference to the apparent failings of “foreigners,” said Saturday Iran would itself construct the $2-billion plant, using a pressurized water reactor (PWR), over eight years on 59 hectares, as part of a wider plan to build “local” plants to power Iran’s industries.
It is not clear if Iran has the technology to independently complete a nuclear reactor. It took Russia decades to finish the Bushehr reactor and Iran was completely dependent on Moscow.
The $2 billion price tag might also be too high and not make sense in comparison to building green renewable sources. For example, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious green energy projects are expected to cost a total of $10 billion with both solar and wind power by 2026 that can provide 50 percent of its electricity needs.
The 300 megawatt that the $2 billion project promises to provide is a tiny contribution to Iran’s ever-increasing consumption of nearly 70,000 megawatts.
The reactor itself has been billed as the country’s first one to be indigenously designed and built. In line with the stress on ‘self-reliance’ beloved of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the AEOI chief stressed the role of Iranian companies in manufacturing the plant’s equipment, including cooling pumps.
Russia has long been in talks with Tehran over new units for Iran’s sole nuclear power station at Bushehr, southern Iran, which began operating in 2011 but has had a checkered performance, producing only 1.25 percent of the country’s electricity in 2021-22. Iran’s stated aim is to produce 10,000 MW of electricity from atomic plants, which if attained would be around a third of the current output today from nuclear power in Japan and roughly equivalent to that of the United Kingdom.
While PWRs are the most common nuclear power plants across the world, any atomic work by Iran is deemed suspicious by the United States, which has twice this year sponsored resolutions critical of Iran at the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations agency tasked with verifying the peaceful nature of nuclear programs.
