Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi was speaking Monday at a ceremony to mark the shipment of the first batch of yellowcake produced in Iran to Esfahan’s Uranium Conversion Facility.
Iran previously had been using yellowcake imported under the Shah from South Africa. Nuclear specialists have been saying that stock must now be near exhaustion and Iran would have to start producing yellowcake itself or shut down its nuclear program.
Iran has two uranium mines, one near Yazd and the other near Bandar Abbas. The ore taken from mines is milled and refined into yellowcake, then shipped to a conversion facility (Iran’s is in Esfahan), which converts the yellowcake into an oxide. That oxide is pumped into centrifuges which spin to get rid of impurities and to raise the proportion of U-235 from less than 1 percent, as found in ore, to about 3.5 percent for use in power reactors or 20 percent for use in some other reactors, like Iran’s at Tehran, or to more than 90 percent for weaponry.
The domestic production of the yellowcake is important because it means Iran is finally producing yellowcake on its own and not dependent on imports.
The Islamic Republic has always obscured the fact that it has been using imported yellowcake to date. Its entire justification for its nuclear program is that it will need nuclear power when its oil and gas run out or it will be forced to depend on foreigners for its energy. But Iran actually has very little uranium ore; that ore will run out long before the oil and gas. In fact, an American analysis concluded that Iran has only enough uranium to fuel its planned 20,000 megawatts of nuclear power generation for a little more than three years. (The Bushehr nuclear power plant will produce 1,000 megawatts of power.)
Salehi also said Tehran will inaugurate a new unit next year to produce fuel plates for the small 5-megawatt Tehran nuclear reactor that produces radioisotopes for medical uses.
“We will have the capability to produce fuel plate in the next year,” Salehi said at a meeting with the officials of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce in Tehran Monday. But in January, Salehi said Iran would have that capability by the middle of this Persian year, which was passed September 22.
Reiterating Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to the purity level of 20 percent to produce fuel plates for the Tehran reactor, he said the country has produced about 35 kilograms of such purity, “which means that the western claims about Iran’s inability to do so have all been wrong and unfounded.” But the West hasn’t said any such thing; on the contrary, it has complained repeatedly about Iran’s continuing to enrich to 20 percent.
It was curious that the yellowcake and fuel plate announcements came from Salehi. He was the head of Iran’s nuclear program until last spring when he became foreign minister. But he has continued making announcements of nuclear developments, overshadowing his successor at the Atomic Energy organization of Iran.