Iran’s nuclear work grows

Iran has slowly but steadily increased its ability to enrich uranium despite international calls to halt its nuclear activities, experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency say in a report released Tuesday.

The report, which became public before a meeting next week by the agency’s board of governors, emphasizes that Iran’s refusal to answer inspectors’ questions about its nuclear activities makes it impossible for the IAEA “to confirm the peaceful nature of Iran’s program.”

The report also notes that traces of plutonium have been found on storage barrels at a waste facility, in addition to a previously reported finding of highly enriched uranium at the site.

Iran had kept its nuclear program secret for more than 18 years, until 2002, and many questions remain unanswered about whether its effort had, or continues to have, a military goal. Highly enriched uranium is the fissile material needed to make a nuclear bomb.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did little to reassure world leaders Tuesday. He said at a news conference in Tehran that there would be “the big celebration of Iran’s full nuclearization in the current year.”

Iran’s current calendar year ends March 20.

Iranian officials have said Tehran would have 3,000 centrifuges, used to enrich uranium, operating by the end of their calendar year. Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that the goal was eventually to have 60,000. “We are at the beginning of a wave,” he said at the gathering, reported by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

Although that goal is possible, it would appear to require a drastic acceleration in Iran’s program.

The IAEA inspectors are reluctant to make any predictions about the speed with which Iran might move ahead.

The United Nations watchdog agency’s inspectors have had increasingly limited information about Iran’s nuclear operations since Tehran reduced their access to nuclear facilities early this year. The action came after the nuclear agency’s board of governors reported Iran to the U.N. Security Council.

“The IAEA, which is the only reliable set of eye and ears, now is mostly blindfolded, their ears are plugged,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior analyst on nuclear nonproliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“Iran has been tightening the blindfold, and that’s dangerous, because without knowing the real status -- how many centrifuges are breaking, how many they are assembling, how many they are manufacturing -- the policymakers have to give credence to the worst-case scenarios, and they become wild guesses ... and that’s dangerous for Iran,” Fitzpatrick said.

Information on how many centrifuges are breaking would allow the nuclear agency to gauge how well the groups of linked centrifuges, known as cascades, are working and to better assess Iran’s progress.

Similarly the inspectors no longer have access to sites where Iran is fabricating or assembling the centrifuges, making it difficult to judge the accuracy of the Iranian claim that the country is poised to set up 3,000 centrifuges.

As is often the case, Ahmadinejad backtracked and moderated his predictions even before the end of Tuesday’s news conference, answering a question: “We want to produce fuel after all. We have to keep going. We have a long way to go to 60,000” centrifuges.

The Bush administration and several European governments fear that Iran intends to use the enriched uranium to build bombs, despite Tehran’s insistence that the material would only fuel civilian power stations.

The report and Ahmadinejad’s comments came amid debate among permanent Security Council members about which sanctions to apply against Iran to pressure the Islamic state into halting its uranium enrichment activities. The European Union and the U.S. have backed a Security Council resolution that would prevent nuclear technology and related missile technology from being sold to Iran and limit visas for some Iranian officials and students. Russia and China, however, want to moderate the sanctions package.

Many people close to the discussions in European capitals and Washington believe there may be the possibility of a negotiated freeze in Iran’s program that could stop Tehran before it becomes capable of producing weapons-grade material. However, that would entail guarantees by the U.S. that it would not seek to change the Iranian regime and a willingness by Washington to hold direct talks with Iran. At the moment both seem remote.

In the meantime, Iran has endeavored to make as much progress as possible toward achieving the full nuclear fuel cycle.

“Iran has been attempting to create facts on the ground for a year or two. They want to be able to say, ‘We’ve already passed that technical milestone,’ ” said a U.S. diplomat familiar with Iran’s program. “Today is another example of that -- [Ahmadinejad is] simply trying to say, ‘You can’t stop us, we’re still moving forward,’ ”

U.S. officials and European diplomats say they are skeptical that Iran could attain the capability to make nuclear weapons in the next couple of years, but Israeli officials believe Tehran already may be so far along that it will be hard to halt its program.

As expected, the nuclear agency’s report confirms that Iran began operating a second cascade of 164 centrifuges Oct. 13. The report also notes that uranium gas has been fed into the first cascade only intermittently.

The two cascades are not linked, said senior officials familiar with the IAEA report. If they were linked, Iran could better enrich uranium, some experts said.

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alissa.rubin@latimes.com

Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this report.