Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Iran Seeking Upgrades To Qom Enrichment Facility

Iran is looking to upgrade the enrichment centrifuges at Qom.
Tuesday's Kayhan daily quotes the head of Iran's nuclear agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, as saying the country has carried out research and development for a new generation of centrifuge to be made domestically.

The machines would be more advanced than the decades old P-1 type centrifuges acquired on the black market and in use at Iran's other enrichment facility in Natanz.
That's a curious situation, given that it has been believed that Iran has been operating IR-2 centrifuges for some time. The IR-2 centrifuges are based on the Pakistani P-2 centrifuges, which are a vastly more efficient system than the large number of P-1 (IR-1) centrifuges that Iran currently operates.

Iran is already well past the threshold level of enrichment necessary for industrial production of enriched uranium; they've gone well past experimental installation of centrifuges, and are now working on full-scale production with one goal in mind; nuclear weapons.

As others note, when will the Obama Administration admit the painfully obvious fact that Iran is intent upon developing a nuclear weapons infrastructure and that the upgraded centrifuges are part of that process?

No comments: