Iran Update
News and comment on the diplomatic movements
over Iran's nuclear programme
No. 138 - 24 November 2009
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Summary
- Iran rejects uranium export offer; IAEA Chief hopeful
that Iran will eventually agree to arrangement
- World powers meet to discuss next steps
- Iran and Israel Appear at Multilateral Talks; Israeli
PM Tentatively Supports IAEA Plan
- IAEA inspectors visit Fordo
- Questions persist around the quality of Iran's enriched
uranium
- Iran launches military exercise that includes defending
nuclear facilities
Iran rejects uranium export offer; IAEA Chief hopeful
that Iran will eventually agree to arrangement
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki
rejected
on November 18th a proposal from the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA), which would have Iran export most of
its lightly-enriched uranium for further enrichment and then
returned for feeding into a nuclear research reactor. The
exportation deal would require that Iran send about 70 percent
of its enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment and
then on to France for fabrication and only then would Iran
receive the more highly enriched uranium in fuel rods about
one
year later. Under the arrangement, the United States would
upgrade the reactor's equipment and Tehran would be required
to use the fuel rods only in that reactor, which Iran employs
primarily for medical purposes.
Iran has been uncomfortable with the proposed
exportation deal, which has been in play officially since
early October. There has been heavy criticism of President
Ahmadinejad from within Iran for contemplating the deal, and
indications that few within the Iranian government trust the
arrangement, given previous experience of nuclear deals with
both France and Russia that have fallen through or experienced
severe delay. Iranian officials had offered
an alternative plan to the IAEA on October 29th. Although
neither Iran nor the IAEA released details of the counter-proposal,
Iran is clearly looking for guarantees
not currently on offer. One proposal appears to allow Iran
to export its low-enriched uranium to Russia in batches,
and only after the West provides it with the French-made fuel
rods. Another would be to make the swap simultaneously and
on Iranian soil. Former British Ambassador to Iran, Sir Richard
Dalton, urged
the West to think seriously about these possibilities, but
western diplomats appear to believe such proposals would weaken
the deal by allowing Tehran to retain greater stocks of its
enriched uranium for further processing within its own borders.
The IAEA's Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei, remains hopeful
that agreement may still be reached before the end of the
year. Iranian representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh,
said they would be willing to continue negotiating, but will
demand a guarantee for the timeliness
of the fuel's delivery.
World powers meet to discuss next steps
After Iran rejected the draft exportation
deal and gave no indication it would slow down its uranium
enrichment program, leaders representing the European Union,
Germany, and the Permanent Members of the U.N. Security Council
(P5): China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United
States, met in Brussels on November 20 to discuss Iran's position
and the possibility
of additional sanctions in general. U.S. President Barack
Obama warned
while he was in South Korea that Iran would face "consequences"
if it did not show greater cooperation "within weeks." One
Obama Administration official has suggested that the Iran
exportation offer might remain
open as a way to encourage Chinese and Russian leaders to
support the levying of additional sanctions, which the other
P5 members perceive as a way to encourage Iranian cooperation.
Iran and Israel Appear at Multilateral
Talks; Israeli PM Tentatively Supports IAEA Plan
During an international conference held in
Cairo at the end of September, Iran's Ambassador to the IAEA,
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, reportedly asked the chief of policy
and arms control at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, Meirav
Zafary-Odiz, whether Israel possesses nuclear weapons. Zafary-Odiz
smiled but did not respond, according to the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, which reported
on the conversation. (Israel has never publicly declared its
nuclear weapons arsenal.) The conference, which was organized
by the International Commission
on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, was held from
September 28th-30th and included private discussions about
a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
cautiously endorsed
the proposed IAEA exportation agreement while meeting with
George J. Mitchell, White House envoy to the Middle East,
on October 30th in Jerusalem. The Prime Minister said that
he believed the proposal "is a positive first step."
Israeli defense officials, however, expressed discontent
with the plan because it would tacitly accept that Iran enriches
uranium on its own soil.
IAEA inspectors visit Fordo
A team from the IAEA conducted an inspection
of Iran's recently revealed uranium enrichment facility on
October 25th-28th. The inspectors visited the heavily protected
facility, which is located in a mountainside 20 miles north
of the holy city of Qom.
The four-member inspection team included Herman Nackaerts,
director of the IAEA's division of operations department of
safeguards. The team was to compare the facility, named "Fordo,"
to its engineering plans, interview employees, and conduct
environmental samples to check for nuclear materials.
Iranian officials have maintained that they
hid the facility in order to protect it from foreign attack,
rather than being an effort to hide nuclear weapons aspirations,
and reiterated that allowing inspections should serve as evidence
that Iran is forthcoming about its nuclear activities. Analysts
believe the facility can house approximately 3,000 centrifuges,
insufficient to sustain a nuclear energy program but useful
for military purposes. The facility remains controversial
as the IAEA believes the secrecy of its construction explicitly
broke Iran's safeguards agreement with them. Iranian officials
say that the facility will come online in about 18 months.
The IAEA sent another
inspection team to the facility on November 19th.
Questions persist around the quality of
Iran's enriched uranium
There remains
a question over the quality of Iran's enriched uranium that
could yet prove problematic for further enrichment. The newsletter
Nucleonics Week reported on October 8th that impurities
in Iran's uranium-specifically "metallic fluoride compounds"-
could harm centrifuges if Iran attempts to further enrich
the fuel to higher levels and would at least make the re-enrichment
process more labor- and possibly time-intensive. A western
safeguards official said last year that Iran had resolved
the problem enough to use its fuel for loading into Pressurized
Water Reactors (PWRs) but "commercial sources," suggest that
Iran has not been able to remove enough of the impurities
for the Tehran research reactor. David Ignatius of The
Washington Post wrote
that Iran's contaminated fuel would be "all but useless for
nuclear weapons." Iran would have to produce new fuel without
impurities or decontaminate the existing stock, possibly lessening
time pressures for negotiations over Iran's nuclear program.
According to the Nucleonics Week article, the French
firm Areva has equipment that could remove impurities from
Iran's existing enriched fuel stock, but it was unclear at
the time whether this capability was factoring into the negotiations
over the exportation deal.
Iran launches military exercise that includes
defending nuclear facilities
Pointing to fears that the United States
or Israel would eventually lead a military strike against
Iran, Iran started five days of military exercises on November
22. The exercises were to include protecting
its nuclear sites from aerial attack. Mojhtaba Zolnoor of
the Revolutionary Guards said that Iran would launch a missile
strike against Tel
Aviv if one or more countries attacked Iran.
Nick Meros, Chris Lindborg, and Paul Ingram, BASIC
Stories and Links
- Impurities in Iran's enriched uranium may factor in
P-5+1 fuel supply deal
Mark Hibbs, Nucleonics Week, Vol. 50, No. 40, October
8, 2009, p. 10
(Available by subscription only.)
Comments, Editorials, and Analysis
- Nuclear Quagmire with Iran
Bernard Gwertzman interview with George Perkovich of the
Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, Council on Foreign Relations, November
23, 2009
http://www.cfr.org/publication/20831/
- Iran Issue is Key to Obama's Other Foreign Policy Goals
Gary J. Schmitt, The Los Angeles Times, reprinted
on the website of the American
Enterprise Institute, November 16, 2009
http://www.aei.org/article/101318
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