Fereydun Abbasi-Davani, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, announced the long-awaited installation Monday, without saying how many or what type of centrifuge had been installed at Fordo.
The fact that Abbasi did not boast about the first deployment of a new and faster generation of centrifuges Iran has been working on hinted that the new centrifuges may still not be ready.
Claims for the new generation of centrifuges have varied over the years with some speakers asserting the new generation could produce twice as much enriched fuel while others claimed six times as much.
In Vienna, Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told Reuters in an interview Friday that moving centrifuges to Fordo was a “further deviation” from the UN Security Council resolutions that demand Iran cease all uranium enrichment.
Abbasi said, “The site [at Fordo] is being made ready and a series of centrifuges has already been transferred here. We aren’t rushing as we seek to observe technical standards.”
Back in June, Abbasi said Iran would install a more modern and faster version of centrifuge at Fordo and use that site to produce uranium enriched to 20 percent to fuel its small research and medical reactor in Tehran. Enrichment to 3.5 percent, the standard for power reactors, would continue at the larger facility in Natanz.
Natanz is designed to hold 54,000 centrifuges, but hasn’t yet surpassed 9,000. Fordo is much smaller and is described as able to hold 3,000 centrifuges.
Fordo is built deep inside a mountain on a Pasdar base. Iran has said that was done to make it immune to bombing. But military planners say the entrance can still be bombed, blocking access to the centrifuge hall inside the mountain.