Enriched uranium, plutonium found in Iran

VIENNA, Austria – New traces of plutonium and enriched uranium – potential material for atomic warheads – have been found in a nuclear waste facility in Iran, a revelation that came Tuesday as the Iranian president boasted his country’s nuclear fuel program will soon be completed.

The International Atomic Energy Agency report detailing the discovery also faulted Tehran for not cooperating with the U.N. watchdog’s attempts to investigate other suspicious aspects of Iran’s nuclear program.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a two-hour news conference in Tehran, asserted the world has no choice but to “live with a nuclear Iran,” although he conceded his country was “still in the first stages” of its uranium enrichment program.

So far, Tehran has been able to activate only two small experimental pilot enrichment plants that U.N. officials say have frequently broken down and have produced only small amounts of material suitable for nuclear fuel.

But Iran has progressed enough since resuming enrichment activities in February to provoke a U.N. Security Council demand that it freeze its program – a call Tehran has ignored. It says it intends to move toward large-scale uranium enrichment involving 3,000 centrifuges by late 2006, then expand the program to 54,000 centrifuges.

Iranian nuclear officials say 54,000 centrifuges would produce enough enriched uranium to fuel a 1,000-megawatt reactor, such as the one being built by Russia that is near completion at the southern city of Bushehr. Experts have estimated Iran would need only 1,500 centrifuges to produce a nuclear weapon.

Tehran insists it is seeking to generate only low-enriched uranium for nuclear fuel and not the highly enriched variety needed for weapons. It also denies it is building a heavy-water research reactor at Arak in order to obtain plutonium for nuclear arms, asserting it wants to produce radioactive isotopes only for medical research and treatment. Still, when finished – probably early in the next decade – Arak could produce enough plutonium for about two bombs a year.

A senior U.N. official who was familiar with the report cautioned against reading too much into the findings of traces of highly enriched uranium and plutonium, saying Iran had explained both and they could plausibly be classified as byproducts of peaceful nuclear activities.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that while the uranium traces were enriched to a higher level than needed to generate power, they were below weapons-grade. The findings, however, were likely to be cited by the United States and other nations suspicious of Tehran’s nuclear agenda as adding to evidence against it.