Iran:Iran has made important strides toward transparency about its nuclear activities but key questions remain unresolved and it has significantly expanded uranium enrichment, a UN report said last night.
The findings may open Iran to harsher UN sanctions due to Western suspicions it is secretly striving to make atom bombs and its defiance of UN demands to suspend enrichment. Iran says it only wants electricity from atomic energy.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said it remained unable to verify Iran was not militarising enrichment at secret sites still denying inspector visits to anything but the few facilities of its declared civilian atomic energy programme.
"Iran's cooperation has been reactive rather than proactive," IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei's report said. "Iran's active cooperation and full transparency are indispensable for full and prompt implementation of the work plan."
In a disclosure likely to alarm the West, the report said Iran's number of centrifuges enriching uranium had soared 10-fold in the past year to 3,000, a level that could start industrial output of nuclear fuel. But Iran was running the centrifuges at low capacity, a senior UN official familiar with the report said.
Even if Iran fed uranium into 3,000 centrifuges at maximum rate for long periods, it would need about 18 months to produce enough fissile material for one bomb, the official said.
The United States said the report showed Iran still defying the international community and giving only "partial answers", leaving no choice but to seek broader, biting sanctions.
UN officials familiar with the IAEA's inquiry said Iran's new cooperation was groundbreaking after years of stonewalling.
The report said Iran had provided much documentation and allowed interviews with involved nuclear officials related to its secret development of centrifuges in the 1980s and 90s.
These can refine uranium for power plant fuel or bombs. - (Reuters)