The Entire Nuclear Activity Of Iran Is Going On

Iran Nuclear Chief: ‘The Entire Nuclear Activity of Iran is Going On’

Iran’s nuclear chief, Dr. Ali Akbar Salehi, Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, in Tehran, took umbrage with calls to “dismantle” the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, in a two-part interview with semi-official state news television Press TV on Tuesday. In the lengthy interview Salehi declared that rather than being dismantled, “The entire nuclear activity of Iran is going on.”

“If you look at the word ‘dismantle’ and you look at it in the dictionary, dismantle means to take apart and try to put it into pieces, equipment,” Salehi said, according to a Press TV transcript of the interview that was conducted in English.

“Well, you can come and see whether our nuclear sites, nuclear equipment and nuclear facilities are dismantled or not. The only thing we have stopped and suspended – and that is voluntarily – is the production of 20 percent enriched uranium and that’s it.”

“Of course, there is another thing that we have undertaken; we have committed ourselves not to install main equipment, which have been defined as to what those main equipments are in the Arak 40 megawatt heavy water reactor.”

“The nuclear facilities are functioning; our enrichment is proceeding, it’s doing its work, it’s producing the 5 percent enriched uranium and those centrifuges that stopped producing the 20 percent will be producing 5 percent enriched uranium. In other words our production of 5 percent [uranium] will increase. The entire nuclear activity of Iran is going on.”

Salehi told the interviewer that the recent Geneva agreement with world powers allows Iran to switch over all of its centrifuges working to make 20 percent enriched uranium to produce to the 5 per cent threshold. He said the agreement does not impact Iran’s ability to develop even more efficient centrifuges, which it is working on now, and would test run for two years before putting them into mass production.

In the second part of the interview, Salehi described Iran’s heavy water reactor, Arak, which he classified as a research reactor “for the purpose of producing radio-isotopes and making other tests: fuel tests, material tests. So many other tests that you can use this reactor and make those tests; use the neutrons and make many different tests with the neutrons emanated from the core of this reactor.”

But he claimed that while Iran’s Bushehr plant also produces plutonium, neither can do so in the quantity and at the refinement level required to create weapons-grade fuel. He said it will take two more years to finish building the Arak reactor, plus a year of testing, a year for the fuel to be used, and a year for it to cool, meaning, “It takes six, seven, eight years before we are able – if we intend to use the plutonium – to extract the plutonium. Seven to eight years and plus you need a reprocessing plant, which we don’t have and we don’t intend to construct.”

At the end of the interview, Press TV asked, “Let’s go back to November 24th, 2013 when Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany reached the so-called Geneva deal. As a nuclear scientist and MIT Graduate and, more importantly, as Iran’s nuclear chief, what was your first reaction?” Saleh began to answer, then changed direction: “I was happy that both sides reached, I mean, took the first step in a one thousand mile journey.”

Source: The Algemeiner