Iran triples enriched uranium production, no answer to IAEA doubts

Iran has tripled its reserves of enriched uranium between November and February, surpassing for the first time the 1,000 kilos of that material, well above the limit of 300 kilos established by the 2015 nuclear treaty, the IAEA, the UN's nuclear agency, declared this Tuesday in a report. In a second report, issued separately, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also expressed its “serious concern” over the lack of Iranian cooperation in clarifying three doubts and concrete suspicions about possible undeclared nuclear activities.

With regard to the purity of the uranium produced, the IAEA experts specify that some 215 kilos were enriched to 3.67%, the maximum level established by the 2015 pact, while the remaining 800 kilos reached 4.5%. The United States, one of the signatories to the 2015 agreement, abandoned the pact in May 2018 and re-imposed sanctions against Iran, including an oil embargo that has hit the Islamic Republic's economy hard. Iran, for its part, began to violate various aspects of the treaty last May, in an attempt to pressure the European countries of the pact - the United Kingdom, France and Germany - to guarantee the economic benefits that were promised to it when it signed the agreement. The so-called “joint action plan” (JCPOA), also signed by China and Russia, would provide for a series of limitations on Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for the lifting of sanctions and economic and commercial relief for the Islamic Republic. In the report focused on the safeguards agreement (controls) with Iran, the IAEA specifies three doubts that it tries to clarify and about which Iran has neither responded nor allowed the inspectors access to nuclear facilities to try to resolve them.

Within the framework of the JCPOA, Iran is implementing the so-called “additional protocol” to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which stipulates free access for IAEA experts to any Iranian facility, civil or military. The IAEA's concerns include the clean-up of a facility allegedly used in an undeclared manner, the alleged storage of nuclear material and natural uranium particles from an unknown site. After ignoring several attempts by the IAEA to receive answers, Iran assured in late January that it does not recognize allegations of past activities, prior to the entry into force of the JCPAO in January 2016.