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Uranium enrichment centrifuges at Iran's Fordow underground site
UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors have detected near bomb grade enriched uranium in Iran last week, Bloomberg reported on Sunday.
Quoting “two senior diplomats” the report said that the IAEA found uranium enriched to 84 percent, while previously Iran was enriching up to 60-percent purity. Enrichment above 90 percent would mean a decision to become a nuclear threshold state.
Bloomberg says that the IAEA needs to determine whether the higher-grade enrichment was intentional or the result of unintended technical processes. Earlier this found, inspectors had found an unusual connection in interconnections of enrichment machines, called centrifuges.
In the past two years, the Islamic Republic has reduced IAEA’s access to monitor its activities and has violated limits set by the 2015 nuclear accord (JCPOA) with world powers that kept enrichment to below 5 percent. Tehran began violating the limit in 2019, when the US imposed full oil export sanctions on Iran after withdrawing from the JCPOA.
Nearly two years of diplomatic attempts to restore compliance with the agreement have failed, with the West also becoming critical of Iran’s bloody crackdown on popular protests and its supply of military drones to Russia.
Any of the three European signatories of the JCPOA, the United Kingdom, France or Germany could trigger a UN Security Council’s mechanism enshrined in the agreement, to reinstate international sanctions on Iran for its enrichment violations.
The IAEA Board of Governors will have its next meeting on March six and a report on Iran will be discussed. If the new violation is presented to at the meeting, Western countries may decide to take the issue to the Security Council.
