Iran opens up nuclear complex to reporters
Iran’s president escorted reporters on an unprecedented visit to the once-secret Natanz nuclear complex today, giving a glimpse into the underground uranium enrichment plant the US and Europe demand be shut down.
Mohammad Khatami spent three hours inspecting the plant at the heart of Iran’s contested nuclear development programme. Under international pressure, Iran suspended its work on building a centrifuge program here but it insists it won’t give it up completely.
The EU and US believe Iran is building the plant to develop weapons-grade fuel, part of a programme Washington insists aims at building nuclear arms.
Tehran says its nuclear programme is only for energy production.
The unfinished complex lies underground beneath a barren desert plain at the foot of a central Iranian mountain range. The area is ringed with anti-aircraft guns.
Iran says the threat of a US or Israeli strike forced it to build underground to protect its technology.
Thirty journalists were taken underground into a concrete corridor where Khatami looked over technical documents, graphs and charts of the site.
Khatami inspected the plant’s string of centrifuges – the core of the enrichment process – but reporters were not allowed to see the machines or any other enrichment technology.
The complex would have been finished and inaugurated last year if Iran had not suspended work, said Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy organisation.
“Our experts are ready to resume work to compensate for lost opportunities during the freeze,” Saeedi said.
Semi-built structures that appeared uninhabited stood above ground in the 1,100 acre complex, 150 miles south of Tehran.
The visit was opened to the press to discount rumours that restricted work was under way at Natanz, Tehran radio said. Khatami visited the Natanz complex and another one in Isfahan to underscore Iran’s insistence on its right to develop the entire nuclear fuel cycle, it said.
Iran kept the plant at Natanz secret until word of its existence slipped out in mid-2002, hiking Western worries over the country’s nuclear programme
The plant’s string of centrifuges enrich uranium, a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity but also make material suitable for atomic warheads.
Iran says the programme’s secrecy and its purchases of nuclear materials on the black market are not proof they aim to develop weapons, insisting they had to resort to such measures even for a peaceful programme because of US sanctions and European restrictions.
