U.N. officials say Iran has slowed work on atomic facilities

Ebrahim Noroozi/AP - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks during a parliament session in Tehran on Nov. 10.

 

By , Published: November 14 E-mail the writer

Iran appears to have dramatically slowed work on its atomic energy program since the summer, U.N. officials said Thursday. The report could add momentum to diplomatic efforts to resolve a decade-old dispute over Iranian nuclear activities.

The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran all but halted the installation of new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plants beginning in August, the same month that moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani was sworn in as president. Work on a controversial nuclear reactor also slowed, the U.N. watchdog agency said. Iran continued producing low-enriched uranium, but at a slightly reduced rate, it said.

The findings provided a boost to the Obama administration, which has joined five other major powers in seeking to negotiate a deal on permanent limits to Iran’s nuclear program. The report suggests that Iran has been unilaterally implementing key parts of a nuclear “freeze” that Western nations have been pursuing during nuclear talks.

The negotiations are scheduled to resume next week in Geneva.

News of the apparent slowdown came as President Obama repeated his appeal to Congress to delay consideration of further economic sanctions on Iran while diplomatic efforts are underway.

“Let’s test how willing they are to actually resolve this diplomatically and peacefully,” Obama said Thursday at a news conference. “We will have lost nothing if, at the end of the day, it turns out that they are not prepared to provide the international community the hard proof and assurances necessary for us to know that they’re not pursuing a nuclear weapon.”

The IAEA report is a periodic snapshot of Iran’s nuclear program by the only group of outside experts allowed regular access to the country’s nuclear energy facilities. In recent years, the U.N. agency has documented a dramatic expansion in Iran’s capability to make enriched uranium, with the addition of thousands of centrifuges at its main enrichment plant in Natanz as well as a smaller, underground facility known as Fordow.

Iran also had been seen making steady progress on a partially constructed nuclear reactor near the city of Arak. The heavy-water reactor is ostensibly intended for medical research and isotope production, but it has raised proliferation concerns because its spent fuel can be reprocessed to extract plutonium, which can be used in nuclear weapons.

The new report shows a sharp drop in activity at each of the sites, starting around the time that Rouhani took office. At Natanz, where Iran had been adding centrifuges at a rate of 600 a month, only four new machines have been put in place since the summer, the IAEA report said. No new centrifuges were installed at Fordow, and work on new reactor components at the Arak plant appears frozen, the report said.

“It shows that they’re not adding capacity, at least at Natanz and Fordow,” said David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based research group.

Read more:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/un-officials-report-slowdown-at-irans-atomic-facilities-in-lead-up-to-nuclear-talks/2013/11/14/2414c20c-4d62-11e3-ac54-aa84301ced81_story_1.html