Iran expanding nuclear activities: IAEA

VIENNA: Iran is making significant progress in expanding its nuclear programme, including in opening up a potential second route to developing the bomb, a new UN atomic agency report showed Wednesday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency's latest quarterly report said that Tehran has accelerated the installation of advanced uranium enrichment equipment at its central Natanz plant.

It also outlined further advances at a reactor under construction at Arak which Western countries fear could provide Iran with plutonium if the fuel is reprocessed.

Highly enriched uranium and plutonium can both be used in the explosive core of a nuclear weapon. Iran has denied this is its aim.

The IAEA report, seen by AFP, said Iran has installed at Natanz almost 700 IR-2m centrifuges and/or empty centrifuge casings, compared with just 180 in February.

Iran has said it intends to install around 3,000 of the new centrifuges at Natanz -- where around 13,500 of the older models are installed -- enabling it to speed up the enrichment of uranium.

The UN Security Council has passed numerous resolutions calling on Iran to suspend all enrichment and heavy water activities -- the kind being built at Arak --, and has imposed four rounds of sanctions.

Last year additional unilateral US and EU sanctions targeting Iran's oil exports and its financial system began to cause real problems for the Persian Gulf country's economy.

Diplomatic efforts to resolve the impasse, most recently in six-power talks with Iran in Kazakhstan in April and last week between Iran and the IAEA, have failed to make concrete progress.

Despite the developments at Natanz, the IAEA report seen noted that Iran has not started operating any new equipment at its Fordo plant.

Fordo is of more concern to the international community, since it is used to enrich uranium to fissile purities of 20 percent and Natanz mostly to five percent.

The ability to enrich to 20 percent is technically speaking considerably closer to 90 percent, the level needed for a nuclear weapon.

At the research reactor under construction at Arak, meanwhile, the IAEA said that the large reactor vessel "has been received but had yet to be installed".

It also "observed that a number of other major components had yet to be installed, including the control room equipment, the refuelling machine and reactor cooling pumps," the IAEA said.

Iran had not provided the IAEA with an updated design information for the IR-40 reactor at Arak since 2006, the IAEA added.

"As the date of the commencement of the IR-40 reactor's operation approaches, this lack of up to date design information is having an increasingly adverse impact on the agency's ability to verify the design of the facility and to implement an effective safeguards approach."

Iran has told the Vienna-based agency that commissioning at the Arak reactor with real fuel assemblies and heavy water will start in the first quarter of 2014, and that the reactor will become operational in the third quarter of 2014.