Iran resumes atomic work, may face Security Council

By Parisa Hafezi

ISFAHAN, Iran (Reuters) – Iran resumed work at a uranium
conversion plant on Monday, fanning Western fears it may be
seeking nuclear weapons and defying EU warnings that it could
be referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible
sanctions.

Iran — which denies harboring nuclear weapons ambitions –
also delivered its formal rejection of a European Union package
of political and economic incentives designed to persuade it to
scrap nuclear fuel work for good.

“The EU proposal was very insulting and humiliating,” said
Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy
Organization.

At the uranium conversion facility near the central city of
Isfahan, two workers wearing white overalls, face masks and
hard hats lifted a barrel of uranium yellow cake, opened its
lid and fed it into the processing line.

Other workers at the plant watched via closed circuit
television as Iran ended the suspension of all nuclear fuel
work agreed with the European Union in Paris last November.

A nuclear scientist, who declined to be named, said: “I am
excited, I didn’t believe it until the last moment thinking
this may not happen, but now I am very happy.”

Britain, Germany and France, heading nuclear negotiations
with Iran for the EU, have called an emergency meeting of the
International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) board of governors
for Tuesday at the U.N. watchdog’s headquarters in Vienna.

“We are not going to speculate on the outcome of that
meeting,” a British Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

“However, our position is well known — were Iran to resume
any part of uranium enrichment activity, including at Isfahan,
this would be a breach of the Paris Agreement signed in 2004.”

A State Department official, who asked not to be named
because the United States was forming its official response,
said: “It’s a symbolic, political, in-your-face move. But it
makes no sense that in some way this is in Iran’s interest.”

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy on Friday
warned Iran that restarting Isfahan would probably see Iran
referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.

UNCONCERNED

Iran said it was unconcerned.

“Even if they issue a resolution tomorrow, since it would
have no legal basis would violate the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, we won’t accept it and will carry on with our work,”
Saeedi told a small group of reporters invited to witness the
resumption of work at Isfahan.

Iran denies any desire to make atomic bombs, saying it
needs nuclear power as an energy source to meet booming
electricity demand and preserve its oil and gas reserves for
export.

Iran says the EU proposal, which included offers of help to
develop civilian nuclear energy and in becoming a major transit
route for Central Asian oil, is unacceptable as it denies Iran
the right to produce its own nuclear fuel.

Iran suspended nuclear fuel work as a confidence-building
measure while it explored a long-term arrangement with the EU.
But Tehran has frequently complained about the slow pace of the
talks and warned the suspension was temporary.

The official IRNA news agency said on Monday that former
state broadcasting head Ali Larijani, a conservative with close
ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would shortly
replace Hassan Rohani as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator.

European diplomats had expressed concerns that pragmatic
cleric Rohani, who has led Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the
EU since 2003, may be replaced by a more hardline official when
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office this month.

“In the letter handed over to the Europeans we have
stressed that the proposal intends to impose one-sided,
discriminative and baseless standards,” the ISNA students news
agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi as
saying.

However, Tehran has so far been careful to stress that it
is not restarting work on the most sensitive element of the
nuclear fuel cycle — uranium enrichment, a process that can be
used to make reactor fuel or atomic warheads.

Earlier, IAEA officials fitted additional surveillance
cameras in an area of the Isfahan facility used for the
preliminary conversion of raw uranium.

A separate part of the plant, where the final conversion
process to create uranium hexafluoride (UF6) is carried out,
will remain under U.N. seals until late on Tuesday while the
IAEA installs monitoring there, Saeedi said.

He said the UF6 would be stored until a later date when it
can be fed into the uranium centrifuges at Natanz.

The IAEA has been investigating Iran’s nuclear program for
three years after an exiled Iranian opposition group revealed
the existence of undisclosed facilities there.

While the IAEA has highlighted numerous failures by Iran to
report potentially weapons-related activities, it has found no
“smoking gun” that would confirm U.S. suspicions it is secretly
trying to make bombs.

(Additional reporting by Berlin, Washington, London
bureaux)