IAEA inspectors visit second Iran nuclear site
Source tells Iran news agency that UN officials are expected to visit newly revealed site again.
By News Agencies Tags: IAEA UN Israel news Iran nuclearA team from the United Nations nuclear watchdog inspected Iran's newly disclosed uranium enrichment site on Sunday, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.
"The inspectors who arrived in Iran on Sunday visited the facility in central Iran. They are expected to visit the site again," Mehr said, without giving a source.
The team of four UN inspectors arrived on Sunday in Iran to visit the recently revealed, though still unfinished, uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom to verify it is for peaceful purposes.
The revelation last month by Iran of the facility's existence, known as Fordo, raised international suspicion over the extent and aim of Tehran's nuclear program.
But Iran says that by reporting the existence of the site voluntarily to the UN's nuclear watchdog, it pre-empted a conspiracy against Tehran by the U.S. and its allies who were hoping to present the site as evidence that Iran was developing its nuclear program in secret.
Iran insists its nuclear program serves to generate power and denies allegations it is trying to make nuclear weapons.
The delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency is led by Herman Nackaerts, Director of IAEA's Division Of Operations Department Of Safeguards.
The inspectors are expected to stay three days in Iran.
The Fordo uranium enrichment site, Iran's second, is said to be in the arid mountains near the holy city of Qom, inside a heavily guarded, underground facility. It is located about 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of Qom.
Iran says the facility won't be operational for another 18 months.
The small-scale site is meant to house no more than 3,000 centrifuges - much less than the estimated 8,000 machines at Natanz, Iran's known industrial-scale enrichment facility. Still, the enriching machines in Qom facility will produce nuclear fuel, which could possibly be further enriched into material for atomic warheads.
Iran says it has built the facility inside a mountain next to a military site to protect its nuclear activities in case of an attack by the U.S. or Israel.
A recent satellite image provided by DigitalGlobe and GeoEye shows a well-fortified facility built into a mountain about 20 miles northeast of Qom ,with ventilation shafts and a nearby surface-to-air missile site, according to defense consultancy IHS Jane's, which did the analysis of the imagery. The image was taken in September.
GlobalSecurity.org analyzed images from 2005 and January 2009 when the site was in an earlier phase of construction and believes the facility is not underground but was instead cut into a mountain. It is constructed of heavily reinforced concrete and is about the size of a football field - large enough to house 3,000 centrifuges used to refine uranium.
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People aren't fools they aren't missing the fact this is more of the hyped up campaign to get Iran when the real threat to the region is Israel (and its apologists in Washington and the EU)with its undocumented nuclear facility & aggression in the region. Dutch
This is a waste of time and a brilliant Iranian 3 card monty trick. If you examine the site using Google Earth you will see it is not one but rather a cluster of facilities buried under a group of hills. All they have to do is devote one of the facilities as a show place for the inspectors and they can continue on with the dirty work at the others next door. But it is all an elaborate head fake and fig leaf anyway, All the noise about enriching uranium is to conceal the reality that they already have nukes obtained from the former Soviet Union and North Korea. They've learned well from North Korea in particular, the masters of yanking the chain of the UN and USA weak knees - negotiating multiple deals with successive administrations and lulling the world into doing nothing, even after actually lighting up a few underground bomb tests.
It's not quite accurate to suggest that Iran "revealed" the facility in Qom; rather that Iran admitted its existence when it became clear the West, which had known about it for years, was about to make its existence public. But the notion that its revelation and cursory inspection make discussion of sanctions moot is also misleading. Given that the Natanz site is now at least under a modicum of inspection, the enrichment site at Qom couldn't have been supplied by Natanz without revealing its existence. Thus, there is almost certainly another enrichment site the public doesn't yet know about.
blindfolded and brain dead.