The Iranian government’s nuclear organization reiterates that this high percentage is normal during the procedure
24 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Organization for Atomic Energy of Iran has gone on to describe this Friday as a “conspiracy” the leak of a preliminary report by international researchers that accuses the Islamic republic of enriching uranium to 84 percent, close to the minimum limit for manufacturing. of an operational nuclear weapon.
Following the initial denials of the Iranian government, the country’s nuclear agency has assured that what happened is nothing more than a natural consequence of the uranium enrichment process, in the words of the agency’s spokesman, Behruz Kamalvandi, in an interview with the Iranian chain Press TV .
In his statements, the spokesman went so far as to accuse the UN counterpart agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), of leaking the initial information without explanation from the Iranian authorities to launch a political attack against the Islamic republic.
“It turns out that there was a confidential letter in this regard where the IAEA asked us about this issue. We responded. The question ends up being published but the answer is not. The objective, then, is to open a gap for those who want to accuse Iran of violating their commitments and not respecting the stipulated safeguards,” the spokesperson said.
These safeguards — certain oversight commitments on Iran’s nuclear program — are among the few that remain of the international agreement reached between the international community and the Islamic republic in 2015, practically broken three years later when the United States, under then-President Donald Trump decided to withdraw from the pact and resume sanctions against the Islamic republic.
ENRICHMENT PROCESS
The suspicions were made known last weekend through sources from the Bloomberg agency. During an international inspection of the Fordow Enrichment Plant in January, IAEA inspectors found that Iran had made an “undeclared change” in the connections between two machines that resulted in uranium enrichment to 84 percent, well below above the expected 60 percent.
In response, Kamalvandi noted that Iran has merely changed the mode of enrichment” and has not changed the “information questionnaire” agreed with the IAEA, as inspectors later confirmed on a new visit.
The spokesman added that the discovery of highly enriched uranium particles “is something normal” in this type of operation. “If you enrich uranium to five percent it is normal to find 11 percent in some particles, just as you find 47 percent uranium when you enrich to 20 percent. Enrichment centrifuges spin very fast and if the amount of unenriched uranium that we supply them decreases at a given moment, the uranium inside is enriched a little more,” he added during the interview, also reported by the semi-official Iranian news agency Tasnim.
The spokesman also denounced the United States and its European allies jumping to condemn this finding in a subsequent joint statement against Iran that Kamalvandi denounced as a “premeditated move” given the speed with which Washington, Berlin, London and Paris rushed to issue His sentence. “They didn’t bother to wait two days for the show they put on to have more credibility,” he lamented.
