Ahmadinejad addresses a ceremony marking National Nuclear Technology Day in Tehran yesterday.

Reuters/Dubai/Vienna


Iran said yesterday operations had begun at two uranium mines and a milling plant and that Western opposition would not slow its nuclear work, days after talks with world powers made no breakthrough.
Marking its annual National Nuclear Technology Day, Iran also said it would continue to need higher-grade enriched uranium - the part of its atomic activity that most worries the West - to fuel additional research reactors it plans to build.
The US and its allies want Iran to stop refining uranium to a fissile concentration of 20% as it represents a relatively short technical step away from potential bomb material. Iran says it uses it to produce medical isotopes.
“We have started the design of a 10-megawatt reactor and the process for determining the location is under way,” Iranian atomic energy chief Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani said, Isna news agency reported. Construction may start this year, he added.
Tehran has made similar statements before but his comments underlined its continued defiance of international demands to curb its disputed uranium enrichment programme, which can have both civilian and military purposes.
Talks between Iran and six world powers held in Kazakhstan last week failed to make progress in resolving a decade-old dispute that threatens to trigger a new war in the Middle East.
Western nations have “tried their utmost to prevent Iran from going nuclear, but Iran has gone nuclear”, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech.
“They caused restrictions and issued threats, thinking that the Iranian nation cannot achieve nuclear energy ... The best way for you is to co-operate with Iran,” he said.
State news agency Irna said Iran had opened the Saghand 1 and 2 mines in the central province of Yazd and a uranium yellowcake plant in the town of Ardakan in the same region.
Yellowcake can be further processed into enriched uranium to make fuel for nuclear power plants, Iran’s stated aim, or to provide material for atomic bombs if refined much more, which the West fears may be Tehran’s ultimate goal.
The office of European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton - who represents the US, Russia, China, Germany, Britain and France in dealings with Iran - said it was no surprise Iran made such announcements on its nuclear day.
“We urge Iran to bring its nuclear activities into compliance with its international obligations,” her spokesman Michael Mann said.
Iran has for years carried out construction work at Saghand and Ardakan, and yesterday’s announcement was apparently intended to show that it is becoming increasingly self-sufficient in the production of nuclear fuel, despite tightening sanctions.
Some Western analysts, however, say Iran may be close to exhausting its supply of yellowcake - or raw uranium - and that such mining in the country is not economical.
Iran has said its mines can supply the uranium ore needed for its nuclear programme and that it has no shortage problems.