The “accident” that damaged a building at the Natanz nuclear center in central Iran on Thursday. It caused “significant damage” and “could slow down” the production of advanced centrifuges for the production of enriched uranium; according to an official source on Sunday.
Tehran on Thursday reported an “accident” at the nuclear complex housing a major uranium enrichment facility. The Iranian authorities said they had established the precise causes of the “accident;” but said they did not want to reveal them to the public immediately “for security reasons”.
“There were no casualties […] but the damage is significant financially,” said the spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Behrouz Kamalvandi, in an interview published Sunday evening by the official agency Irna, without elaborating on the nature of the damage.
“We’ll make up for this slowdown”
On Thursday, Behrouz Kamalvandi had presented the damaged building; apparently by fire according to images published by the OIEA and state television – as “a warehouse”. But in his interview, he said that “it was planned” that this room would eventually produce “more advanced centrifuges”; without making it clear whether such machines had already begun to be assembled there.
“In the medium term, this accident could slow down the development and production plan for advanced [centrifuges], but God willing, and with the continued efforts of our colleagues [at the OAS] we will compensate for this slowdown so that more capacity will be created at this site than before,” he adds. According to Irna, the spokesperson stressed that the current uranium enrichment activities at Natanz were not affected by the accident.
Released from the agreement
Under the agreement on its controversial nuclear program concluded with the international community in Vienna in 2015, the Islamic Republic is obliged to use only a limited number of so-called “first-generation” centrifuges.
But since May 2019, in response to the decision taken a year earlier by the United States to denounce this pact and to restore economic sanctions against it; Iran has gradually freed itself from the key commitments it had made in Vienna. Tehran has thus restarted the enriched uranium production activities that it had agreed to suspend at Natanz.
Iran has also announced that it will lift all restrictions on its uranium enrichment research and development activities, and is working to develop more efficient centrifuges. But Tehran repeats that it has no intention of acquiring the atomic bomb; as the United States and Israel accuse it of doing.
Source: LeParisien
