Iran starts building new nuclear plant - diplomats

Louis Charbonneau, Reuters:

Iran has started building a research reactor that could eventually produce enough plutonium for one bomb per year, ignoring calls to scrap the project, diplomats close to the United Nations said on Thursday.

"Iran has laid the foundations for the research reactor at Arak," a Western diplomat close to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

In September, the IAEA board of governors passed a resolution calling on Iran "as a further confidence-building measure, voluntarily to reconsider its decision to start construction of a research reactor modified by heavy water".

Heavy-water reactors can be used to produce significant amounts of bomb-grade plutonium, which can then be extracted from the spent fuel.

Diplomats on the IAEA's 35-member board, as well as diplomats close to the IAEA, said they learned the foundations had been laid from photos taken by a commercial satellite.

The United States and other countries critical of Iran have questioned the need for this reactor, which is expected to be ready the end of this decade at the earliest.

"Iran has provided changing and contradictory rationales to the IAEA for this project, which would be well suited for plutonium production," the head of the U.S. delegation to the IAEA meeting, Jackie Sanders, told the IAEA board on Wednesday. ...