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Iran resumes atomic work, may face Security Council

Posted on: Monday, 8 August 2005, 10:14 CDT

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)

Source: REUTERS

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