Iran making new model centrifuges for nuke program

[December 18, 2009]  TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's nuclear chief said Friday the country has started making more efficient models of centrifuges that will be in use in its nuclear program by early 2011.

The official, Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, said Iranian scientists are still testing the more advanced models before they will be put to use at Iran's enrichment facilities.

The statement underscores Iran's defiance to U.N. demands to have Tehran halt its controversial enrichment program -- a defiance that has not wavered amid recent signals of possible new sanctions over the issue.

Tehran has been saying since April that it is building more advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium with higher efficiency and precision, but Salehi's remarks were the first indication of a timeline when the new models could become operational.

Iran's uranium enrichment is a major concern to the West, worried that the program masks efforts to make a nuclear weapon. Tehran insists its enrichment work is peaceful and only meant to generate electricity, not make an atomic bomb.

Iran has threatened to expand its enrichment program tenfold, even while rejecting a plan brokered by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to supply fuel for Iran's research reactor if Tehran exports most of its enriched stockpile.

The U.N. plan would leave Iran -- at least temporarily -- without enough uranium to produce a bomb.

Centrifuges are machines used to enrich uranium -- a technology that can produce fuel for power plants or materials for a nuclear weapon. Uranium enriched to low level is used to produce fuel but further enrichment makes it suitable for use in building nuclear arms.

"We are currently producing new generation of centrifuges named IR3 and IR4," Salehi told the semiofficial Fars news agency. "We hope to use them by early 2011 after resolving problems and defects."

He did not elaborate on the technical details or the difference between various centrifuge types.

However, Salehi added: "We are not in a rush to enter the industrial-scale production stage."

The new centrifuges would likely replace the decades-old P-1 centrifuges, once acquired on the black market and in use at Iran's main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, central Iran.

Iran has said the new centrifuges would also be installed at Iran's recently revealed secret uranium enrichment facility. The plant is still under construction at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.

Salehi said that more than 6,000 centrifuges are currently enriching uranium -- 2,000 more than the figure mentioned in a November report by the U.N. watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iranian officials have claimed that most parts for the new centrifuges are made domestically and others have been imported -- a sign that Iran is able to get around U.N. sanctions imposed on the country for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.

Salehi said new U.N. sanctions won't stop Iran from developing its nuclear program.

"We don't welcome new (U.N. Security Council) resolutions," he told ISNA, another semiofficial news agency. "But resolutions won't stop us in any field, including the nuclear."

[Associated Press; By ALI AKBAR DAREINI]

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