Israel Matzav

Iran halts uranium enrichment.. for maintenance

Prime Minister Netanyahu poo-poohed an IAEA report this week that claimed that Iran had halted uranium enrichment since Hassan Rohani's election. He was right. The halt was for maintenance purposes.

Iran has over the past year in effect kept the amount of its 20 percent reserve well below Israel's so-called "red line" by converting a large part of the uranium gas into oxide to make fuel for a medical research reactor in Tehran.

"Iran does not want to provoke Israel to attack Iran. Especially now," said nuclear expert Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank.

But conversion work was halted between August 20 and November 5, in part for maintenance reasons, according to the quarterly report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), issued to member states late on Thursday.

As Iran continued its production of 20 percent uranium gas, the stockpile would probably have grown steadily during much of the August-November period covered by the report, perhaps to significantly above 200 kg, analysts and diplomats said.

...

The IAEA data suggests, however, that Iran moved fast once it resumed conversion early this month, leading to a more modest rise to 196 kg in the November 14 report, up by about 10 kg since the previous one issued in late August.

Tehran may have done so by attaching a full cylinder of uranium gas to the conversion process, thereby reducing the stockpile, one nuclear expert said.

"There are rumors it got quite high - though not over the 'red line'," one Western diplomat in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, said. "I think the decision to blend down is politically driven."

...

A senior diplomat familiar with the IAEA's report said Iran's move to stop converting during a couple of months for maintenance was "normal ... nothing exceptional".

The IAEA report showed that since Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate, became president in August Iran had virtually stopped the expansion of its overall uranium enrichment capacity.

Iran plans to go to the point where a breakout would take days... and then wait to see what happens. It is long past time to stop them.

Labels: Iranian nuclear threat, uranium enrichment

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:42 PM