Vienna: On Monday, The UN nuclear watchdog asserted anxiety that Iran had not explained doubts over potential undeclared nuclear action, adding that its enhanced uranium stockpile was 16 times above the limit.
The two reports published by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday are the prime substantive reports after Iran ceased some reviews in February. Recently the IAEA said it had stretched a brief deal with Iran until June 24 which has permitted many reviews to proceed.
The report said IAEA director general Rafael Grossi was “concerned that the technical discussions between the agency and Iran have not yielded the expected results,” relating to transactions on the places where undeclared nuclear movement may have happened. The result appears notwithstanding a “proactive and focused effort” started by the IAEA in April “to break the impasse” over the places. The IAEA states that the consequences of its inquiry work have set “a clear indication that nuclear material and/or equipment contaminated by nuclear material has been present” at three undeclared areas, with most of the movement in question recording back to the early 2000s. The agency also told Iran has refused to answer questions concerning a fourth spot where natural uranium may have been existing between 2002 and 2003 in the pattern of a metal disc.
Iran and world powers are involved in discussions in Vienna to save the 2015 nuclear agreement after ex-US President Donald Trump walked away from it in 2018 and reimposed crippling consents on Tehran. Trump’s successor Joe Biden has flagged his readiness to restore the plan. For this to occur, the US would require to revert to the agreement and raise the bans reinstated by Trump while Tehran would have to re-commit to full acquiescence with nuclear commitments it progressively reversed since 2019. In another report, the IAEA said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is approximately 16 times the limit set down in the 2015 contract with world powers.
It gave an evaluation of a stockpile of 3,241 kilograms but said that it was not ready to confirm the total.
The limit placed down in the 2015 agreement was 300 kilograms of uranium in a particular compound form, the equivalent of 202.8 kilograms of uranium. A senior diplomat who is familiar with the issue said that while the postponement of some reviews suggested that the IAEA could not provide specific values for the stockpile, its level of access to the indicated sites has not been considerably decreased and its stockpile evaluation would still be correct to within a few percentage points. The scale of production of enriched uranium has decreased after the last quarterly report from the IAEA in February.
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Under the 2015 agreement, the enrichment level was proposed to be capped at 3.67 percent, well under the 90 percent purity required for a nuclear weapon. The latest report will be given to the IAEA’s board of governors next week. Discussions to reestablish the 2015 agreement are going on in Vienna as Iran equips for the presidential polls on June 18. The media had extensively prophesied a showdown between ultraconservative judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi and moderate conservative Ali Larijani, a key domestic backer of the 2015 agreement. However, last week Larijani was banned from competing.
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