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The country’s nuclear chief said that for the first time the country had mined its own uranium—which can be processed into material used to make nuclear energy or nuclear weapons—giving it a way to bypass UN sanctions prohibiting the material’s import. The announcement displays Iran’s determination to master nuclear technology without outside help just a day before world powers meet Iranian officials in Geneva in another attempt to persuade them to freeze key aspects of that work.
Nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said the uranium ore concentrate, known as yellowcake, was produced at the Gachin uranium mine in southern Iran and delivered to the uranium conversion facility in the central city of Isfahan for reprocessing.
Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, said the delivery was evidence that last week’s assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist and the wounding of another in mysterious bombings will not hamper Iran’s nuclear progress.
“Today, we witnessed the shipment of the first domestically produced yellowcake... from Gachin mine to the Isfahan nuclear facility,” said Salehi.
Iran is under four sets of UNSC sanctions that forbid the supply of nuclear materials to Tehran. In 2009, Western nations claimed Iran was running out of raw uranium for its nuclear programme.
Tehran issued denials but has in recent years sought to extract uranium from its own deposits.