New nuclear site shows Iran immune to threats

A suspected uranium-enrichment facility near Qom, 156 km (97 miles) southwest of Tehran, is seen in this September 27, 2009 satellite photograph released by DigitalGlobe on September 28, 2009.

VIENNA (Reuters) - Building a second uranium enrichment site is a "political message" from Iran that neither sanctions nor possible military attack will ever stop its nuclear programme, a senior Iranian official said on Tuesday.

In an interview, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's envoy to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, said the agency's concern Tehran may be hiding more nuclear work after it unveiled the enrichment site was wrong, unfair and a political judgment beyond its mandate.

He told Reuters Iran's disclosure in September of the Fordow site near Qom, being erected in case its much larger Natanz enrichment center was bombed, showed it was heeding transparency commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In a report on Monday, the IAEA said Iran's acknowledgement of the Fordow plant's existence was long overdue and "reduces confidence" that Tehran was not concealing other sites -- possibly support facilities Fordow.

It said Iran had told the IAEA it started building the plant within a bunker beneath a mountain in the second half of 2007, but the IAEA had satellite pictures and intelligence evidence indicating construction work got under way as early as 2002.

Iran granted IAEA inspectors full access to the site on October 26-27 but not to the plant's director and original designers. The report said Iran had not yet convincingly ruled out the existence of more covert nuclear sites or plans for any.

Referring to the scepticism conveyed by the IAEA report, Soltanieh said: "We reject this 100 percent. This kind of judgment is absolutely wrong, unfair, political and beyond the (IAEA's) mandate. There is no justification for it."

"The new Fordow site ... is a clear political message that neither U.N. Security Council sanctions nor the threat of military attack can stop (our) enrichment under full scope safeguards of the IAEA," he said, speaking in English.

WEST MUST FACE REALITY

"So the advice to those (Western powers) who have so far not coped with this reality is to cope with this reality -- that this enrichment will continue at any price under IAEA (monitoring) for peaceful purposes," said Soltanieh.

"This is a contingency site, complementary to Natanz, in order that our enrichment process will never, ever be suspended. Its purpose is just to have a more protected, secure site."

The inspectors found the Fordow installation in "an advanced" state of construction. Iranian officials told them it would start up with 3,000 centrifuge machines in 2011.

Iran says the site, like Natanz, is meant to yield low-enriched fuel only for civilian power plants, of which it has none except for the almost completed Bushehr facility which is to be run with Russian enriched uranium.

Western nuclear analysts say Fordow's small capacity makes it unsuitable for any purpose but to enrich smaller quantities of uranium suitable for a bomb. Enrichment sites generally need tens of thousands of centrifuges to feed a nuclear power plant.

Western suspicions rest on Iran's history of nuclear secrecy and restricting IAEA inspections and access for investigations.

Iran has defied U.N. Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions over its refusal to suspend enrichment in exchange for trade benefits or grant unfettered IAEA inspections meant to verify it has no clandestine nuclear arms programme.

Western diplomats said in September that Iran owned up to the Fordow site only after learning that their spy services had detected it and an announcement by Western leaders was imminent.

At a G-20 summit in Pittsburgh on September 25, they condemned Iran's cloak of secrecy over the plant and said it heightened suspicions Iran's professed peaceful enrichment programme was a mfacade for efforts to "weaponize" the technology.

Soltanieh said Iran's subjection of the plant to IAEA monitoring made a mockery of the Western stance.

"(We have shown) that the reaction in Pittsburgh, these speculations and misjudgements and other avalanches of bombardments in the (Western) media were unjustified," he said.

Soltanieh said Iran had declared the site's existence "well in advance" of its legal obligations to the IAEA.

But IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei told reporters during a visit to Italy on Tuesday: "(Iran) should have declared it from the day they decided to do it. They were on the wrong side of the law by not complying with our regulations."

The IAEA toughened its transparency statute for member states in 1992 to require them to alert it of nuclear plans as soon as they are drafted. Iran accepted the new code a decade later, but renounced it in 2007 in protest at sanctions.

Iran re-adopted the previous rule mandating only 180 days' notice before nuclear materials are brought into a new facility.

(Additional reporting by Maurizio Troccoli in Italy; Editing by Samia Nakhoul)