Iran has started enriching uranium at its underground Natanz plant with a second type of advanced centrifuge, the IR-4, the UN's nuclear watchdog said in a report reviewed by Reuters on Tuesday, in a further breach of Tehran's 2015 deal with major powers.
Iran accelerated breaches of the deal's restrictions on its nuclear activities in an apparent effort to put pressure on US President Joe Biden. The sides are locked in a stand-off over who should move first to save the deal.
Tehran's breaches began in 2019 in response to the US withdrawal from the deal and the reimposition of economic sanctions against Iran under Mr Biden's predecessor Donald Trump, who opposed the agreement and abandoned it.
Last year, Iran started moving three cascades, or clusters, of different advanced models of centrifuge from the surface plant at Natanz to its below-ground fuel enrichment plant.
Iran is enriching uranium underground using IR-2m centrifuges, although the deal only allows it to enrich in the plant using first-generation IR-1 machines.
"On March 15, 2021, the agency verified that Iran began feeding the cascade of 174IR-4 centrifuges already installed at [the Fuel Enrichment Plant] with natural UF6," the International Atomic Energy Agency said in the report to member states.
UF6 is uranium hexafluoride, the form in which uranium is fed into centrifuges for enrichment.
Iran has indicated that it now plans to install a second cascade of IR-4 centrifuges at the plant but installation of that cascade has yet to begin, the report said.
Iran has already increased the number of IR-2m machines, which are far more efficient than the IR-1 machines, installed at the underground plant.
"In summary, as of March 15, 2021, Iran was using 5,060IR-1 centrifuges installed in 30 cascades, 522IR-2m centrifuges installed in three cascades and 174IR-4 centrifuges installed in one cascade, to enrich natural UF6 up to 5 per cent U-235 at [the plant]," the report said.
Iran is enriching up to 20 per cent purity at its Fordow plant to the north-east of the city of Qom.
From Zero
Artist: Linkin Park
Label: Warner Records
Number of tracks: 11
Rating: 4/5
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Percentage increase in visitors in eight years: 500 per cent
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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