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UN inspectors play detective over
Iran
By Charles Recknagel and
Ron Synovitz
SEIBERSDORF, Austria - It's
an hour's drive through the Austrian countryside -
past snow-covered farms and villages - to the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA's)
laboratory complex outside Vienna.
Deep
inside the complex is the Clean Lab, a
high-technology facility equipped to detect tiny
levels of radiation. And it's where the IAEA
inspectors bring their samples from Iran's nuclear
sites for analysis.
Inside the Clean Lab,
there is a hum from machinery surrounding a small,
sealed-off chamber where visitors cannot go.
Within that chamber, four people in spotless white
suits hover over electronic consoles. Their shoes
are left outside.
David Donohue is the
head of the Clean Lab. He and his team are experts
in the high-stakes game of determining the true
nature of a country's nuclear program. The game
pits radiation-detection equipment against
official efforts to conceal activities that might
lead to nuclear weapons.
Donohue says the
Clean Lab has received some samples of uranium
enriched to 50% from Iran. "I think there were
some particles seen with 50%, or between 30% and
50% enrichment, which is quite high," he said. "Of
course, you need to have up to about 90%
enrichment to make a nuclear weapon. But, even so,
in a country which says they haven't enriched any
uranium at all, to find these kinds of particles
was a surprise and the [IAEA] is looking into the
different explanations for that."
Iran
denied it was trying to enrich uranium until an
exiled opposition group exposed a secret
underground pilot project near Natanz in 2002 .
Tehran later said the high levels of enrichment
found at the site after it was opened to IAEA
inspectors was caused by contaminated machinery
imported from other countries.
Today, the
nuclear crisis continues, as Tehran insists on its
right under international treaties to pursue
low-level uranium enrichment as part of a peaceful
nuclear program. However, enrichment processes are
hard to monitor, raising fears that they could be
secretly applied to bomb making.
Iran's
explanation of the origins of its highly enriched
uranium has yet to be sufficiently proven to
reassure the international community. So the IAEA
has stepped up its inspection efforts to learn
more about Iran's activities.
Donohue
describes the sometimes cat-and-mouse nature of
the inspection efforts. The IAEA experts like to
target industrial and military sites equipped for
the kind of high-precision machine work needed to
produce nuclear components. But Tehran has at
times barred inspection teams from sites for days.
When the inspectors finally get access, they find
only empty rooms - and the battle of wits really
begins.
"You go in with these swipe
samples. You try to collect dust from places which
haven't been cleaned lately, like the ventilation
ducts or inaccessible places where they probably
haven't cleaned very well - or you sample the
floor, or the walls, or something like that,"
Donohue said. "And you are just looking for these
small traces of uranium [or] plutonium that would
give you a clue what they did in there."
The task of detecting any radioactive
material swept up in the samples falls to the
nuclear engineers of the Clean Lab. Donohue says
the laboratory has instruments capable of finding
even the faintest traces.
"For this we
need very expensive and very sensitive
instruments, different kinds of mass spectrometers
and an electron microscope, things like that, to
target in on these few uranium particles that are
there, to ignore all the millions of particles
that are not of any interest," he said. "So, we
have these instruments, they cost $1 million, some
of them. And with this we are able to find the
needle in the haystack, the five or 10 particles
of uranium in a swipe [sample] that has a million
particles of dirt."
If the Clean Lab team
finds traces of radiation, it forwards the samples
to other more specialized nuclear laboratories for
further analysis. The other laboratories - which
can be in the United States, Russia, a European
Union state, Japan or Australia - provide further
information as to how and where the radioactive
material was produced or used.
The IAEA
hopes its inspections will ultimately provide the
evidence for determining whether Iran does - or
does not - have programs to develop nuclear
weapons. But so far the agency says it is still
far from being able to answer that question
definitively.
IAEA director general
Muhammad ElBaradei said this month that the
inspectors are making "good progress" in
understanding the nature of Iran's nuclear
activities. He also called on Tehran to be "more
transparent" with his agency if it wants to build
confidence that Iran has only a peaceful nuclear
program.
Iran opens one nuclear
door
When about 30 Iranian and foreign
journalists approached the Natanz nuclear facility
for their state-sponsored tour this week, they saw
a sprawling complex ringed by mountains and at
least 10 anti-aircraft batteries.
The
existence of the 450-hectare facility was first
revealed to the IAEA in 2002 by an Iranian exile
group. Wednesday marked the first time reporters
have been allowed to photograph Natanz. At its
heavily guarded gate, there were no signs to
indicate the nature of the work going on inside.
Washington and the European Union fear
Iran could be using nuclear centrifuges at Natanz
and elsewhere to produce heavily enriched uranium
for nuclear weapons.
Iran's President
Mohammad Khatami, who accompanied the tour,
admitted that Tehran plans to enrich uranium as
part of what he calls a "pilot program" at Natanz.
But he repeated Tehran's long-held assertion that
its nuclear program is only for generating
electricity.
"We will definitely enrich
[uranium]. And naturally we will start with a
pilot [program]," he said. "I hope that this step
will be taken with an agreement - an understanding
and commitment from our European friends and the
IAEA regarding our commitments, which we have
met."
The tour was an unusual gesture of
openness by Iran. The journalists were taken deep
inside a building where, two levels below ground,
they were shown a vast, empty room designed for
50,000 enrichment centrifuges.
Iranian
officials say the enrichment facility was built
more than 18 meters underground because of what
they call "security problems".
Ian Kemp, a
London-based independent defense expert, says it
is a precaution against possible aerial attack by
the US or Israel - which both have vowed to stop
Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
"From
the Iranian perspective," Kemp said, "they would
be justified in taking defensive measures, not
only for their nuclear facilities but also for
their non-nuclear power generation facilities.
They've experienced in the past that Israel has
the capability to strike targets inside Iran. And,
of course, there was the 2003 campaign [by the US
in Iraq]. So they know that the power
infrastructure would be a likely target if the
Americans were ever to take military action
against Iran."
Centrifuges are used to
purify uranium fluoride gas into fuel for reactors
or bombs by spinning the radioactive material at
high speeds. Low-grade enriched uranium is used in
nuclear power plants. High-grade "heavily
enriched" uranium is needed to make the core of a
nuclear bomb.
The journalists were not
shown any centrifuges. And they were not allowed
to visit the pilot enrichment facility at Natanz
to inspect dozens of centrifuges that were sealed
off by IAEA inspectors in October 2003 pending
discussions with the EU on the future of its
nuclear program.
In Washington, US State
Department spokesman Adam Ereli dismissed the tour
of Natanz as a "staged media event" that falls
short of the openness needed to end Iran's nuclear
dispute with the US and the EU.
Ereli says
if Iran is really serious about transparency in
its nuclear program, it should answer all of the
IAEA's outstanding questions. He says Iran should
stop denying IAEA inspectors full and unrestricted
access to sites like the Parchin high-explosives
facility about 30 kilometers southwest of Tehran.
And he says Tehran should stop refusing IAEA
requests to interview key officials associated
with Iran's nuclear activities.
Kemp
believes the US State Department is right to
dismiss the value of the journalists' tour. "I
think the State Department is very accurate about
the usefulness of journalists - who have very
little understanding of the complexities of
nuclear issues or the sort of insight they would
be able to bring to an inspection of Iranian
nuclear facilities," he said. "This really is
something that requires experts of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. Or, indeed,
experts that are agreed upon by the parties that
are concerned. Because, of course, much of this
equipment can be used for dual purposes - nuclear
power for civilian use but also spin-off for
military programs."
IAEA inspectors first
visited Natanz in early 2003. Tehran is currently
engaged in talks with a troika of nations from the
EU, which wants Iran to permanently scrap Natanz
and other nuclear fuel work in return for
assistance with developing nuclear energy and
other economic and security cooperation.
Copyright (c) 2005, RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington DC 20036 |
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