WASHINGTON — Nuclear advances trumpeted Wednesday by Iran were not unexpected and their announcement may have been driven by domestic Iranian politics, but they still could add to tensions over that country’s nuclear program, U.S. officials and experts said.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the country had installed 3,000 new centrifuges for processing nuclear fuel, had for the first time successfully installed Iranian-produced fuel rods in a research reactor, and would embark next year on the production of yellow cake, a concentrated powder made from uranium ore and used in the enrichment process.
At the same time, Iran said that it would end oil sales to six European nations if they refuse to sign long-term contracts and move to implement an embargo on Iranian oil scheduled for July.
“We do not have any problem in terms of finding customers for our oil and selling it to other countries,” the state-run news agency quoted Foreign Ministry official Hassan Tajik as saying.
Iranian media portrayed the nuclear developments as showing that Iran has mastered the process that transforms uranium ore into low-enriched uranium, the fuel that powers nuclear reactors. The same process also produces highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
But David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector who heads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said that “none of these (announcements) are a surprise.” Other analysts pointed out that they came just two weeks before parliamentary polls and may be part of a bid by Ahmadinejad to boost his loyalists against archconservative candidates.
Still, the announcements are likely to increase tensions over the Iranian nuclear program as the U.S. presses for tougher economic sanctions. The announcements also are likely to color how diplomats view Iran’s response to a European Union invitation to new negotiations on its nuclear program. Iran accepted the proposal, a Western diplomat who’d read the response said.
The diplomat, who asked not to be identified because EU, U.S., Russian and Chinese officials were still studying the response, said that Iran didn’t appear to be setting any conditions for its return to negotiations, which broke down in January 2011.
