An Iranian official has confirmed that the country has stepped up its nuclear activities, following a report from the UN atomic agency that said Iran has accelerated uranium enrichment. "Iran has started another stage of injecting hexafluoride gas into centrifuge machines," the student news agency ISNA quoted an unnamed official as saying on Friday.
"Iran is also pursuing a plan to have a 3,000-centrifuge cascade by the end of the current year (March 2007)," he noted, adding that all the material used in uranium enrichment facilities has been produced domestically.
A report from the International Atomic Energy Agency obtained by AFP on Thursday said that Iran had accelerated uranium enrichment on June 6, the same day world powers asked it to halt the work and open talks to guarantee it will not make nuclear weapons.
On that Tuesday, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana visited Tehran to present a package of benefits aimed at enticing Iran to suspend uranium enrichment.
Enriched uranium makes nuclear reactor fuel, and in a highly refined form can produce atom bomb material.
"Iran is continuing its installation work on other 164-machine cascades," said the report from the IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei.
Iran built the cascade as a pilot plant for what it hopes will eventually be an industrial plant of more than 50,000 centrifuges, used to refine the uranium 235 isotope.
Iran started last August to make feedstock uranium hexafluoride gas, which it then fed into centrifuges in February this year. It produced enriched uranium beginning in April.
The quality of enriched uranium being produced in April was appropriate for nuclear reactor fuel and was not the highly-enriched variety needed to make weapons.
