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Mar 19th
Home News Sensitive Materials Iran picks sites for 10 uranium enrichment plants
Iran picks sites for 10 uranium enrichment plants
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Reuters, 23 Feb 2010.

Iran has identified potential sites for 10 new nuclear enrichment plants and construction of two of them could begin this year, a nuclear energy official said on Monday. 

Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organisation, said the sites had been chosen in remote mountainous areas to help protect from them from an attack.

"We have earmarked close to 20 sites and have passed the report on those to the president. However, these sites are only potential," Salehi was quoted as saying by the Iranian news agency ISNA.

"We should begin the construction of two enrichment sites next year," he said. "In the two new sites, we plan to use new centrifuges."

The next Iranian year begins on March 21.

Iran's uranium enrichment, in defiance of several rounds of U.N. Security Council sanctions, has spurred world powers to consider tougher measures to halt what the West fears is a covert nuclear weapons drive.

Tehran denies it is seeking to build an atomic bomb and says it only wants to enrich uranium for electricity generation and medical isotopes.

Iran announced plans in November to build 10 new enrichment plants to match its existing Natanz complex. The announcement came as the United States and its allies hoped to reach an agreement for Iran to enrich uranium abroad.

Analysts say Israel, a U.S. ally and an arch enemy of Iran that attacked an Iraqi reactor in 1981, could try to bomb any site in the future.

NETANYAHU SEEKS ENERGY EMBARGO

The top U.S. military officer cautioned that an attack on Iranian facilities would only delay, not stop, Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. He cited estimates that a military strike could set Tehran back by just one to three years.

"No strike, however effective, will be in and of itself decisive," Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Washington.

"I worry a lot about the unintended consequences of any sort of military action. For now, the diplomatic and the economic levers of international power are and ought to be the levers first pulled."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for an immediate embargo on Iran's energy sector, saying the U.N. Security Council should be sidestepped if it cannot agree on the move.

If the world "is serious about stopping Iran, then what it needs to do is not watered-down sanctions, moderate sanctions ... but effective, biting sanctions that curtail the import and export of oil into Iran," Netanyahu said in a speech.

Analysts are sceptical whether sanctions-bound Iran, which has problems obtaining materials and components abroad, would be able to equip and operate 10 new enrichment plants.

They see Iran's claims to have plants running within a few years as a bluff.

Salehi said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would announce on April 9 what kind of centrifuges are to be used at the new sites.

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