nuclear-news

Enrichment

The biggest obstacle to a deal is the fundamental question of how big the Iranian nuclear programme should be. The key issue here is the country’s capacity to enrich uranium…………

Arak

For more than 12 years, Iran has been building a heavy water reactor in Arak, which is now close to completion. Officially it is for the production of isotopes for various industrial, agricultural, medical and other scientific uses. Western sceptics point out the planned reactor is more powerful than would be needed for such uses. They believe it is for the production of plutonium, another route to make a bomb, which is created as part of the spent fuel.

Iran refuses to scrap the project, saying it has invested a lot of time and money in it, building a heavy water production plant nearby. But this could be a relatively easy issue to fix……..

Past weaponisation work

The question of whether Iran had a large-scale programme to develop technologies for making a warhead, at least until 2003 as most western intelligence agencies believe, has not been resolved. For many years, IAEA inspectors have been presenting a shopping list of requests to see documents, interview scientists, and visit suspects sites, but have made little progress……..

Oversight

Long-term increased scrutiny by IAEA inspectors would have to be part of any nuclear deal. At a minimum, this would involve a regime of enhanced inspections which the IAEA calls the “additional protocol”. This would involve access by inspection teams to all parts of the nuclear cycle, from uranium mining onwards, and would allow them to take environmental samples anywhere they deem fit………

Sanctions

Sanctions relief is the main bargaining chip the six powers have in their hands at the negotiating table, and it is one of the thorniest issues, because having placed sanctions on Iran, western governments are going to find it hard to take them off. Over the years, the US and EU have gone beyond measures agreed at the UN, and built up a tangle of interlocking and overlapping punitive restrictions on doing business with Iran……….