Iran: New water plant 'a peaceful project'

Iran’s Foreign Ministry today insisted their newly opened heavy-water production plant was a peaceful project and not associated with Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme.

“(The) heavy-water production plant is completely peaceful. Iran has worked on the project in the framework of international framework and norms,” said ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi. “It has nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear case.”

Asefi’s comments come just days before a deadline on Thursday set by the UN Security Council demanding Tehran suspend uranium enrichment or face economic and political sanctions.

Iran has said it is open to negotiations but it refused any immediate suspension, calling the deadline illegal.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who inaugurated the heavy-water plant in central Iran, said that his country was not a threat even to Israel but insisted Tehran would not give up pursuing nuclear technology.

A senior Israeli lawmaker disagreed, saying Iran can’t be trusted. Legislator Ephraim Sneh of the Labor Party warned that the heavy-water plant marks “another leap in Iran’s advance toward a nuclear bomb”.

Ahmadinejad previously has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”.

Asefi today repeated that Iran is not a threat to the Jewish state.

Tehran has repeatedly said its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes, but the US and some allies fear Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

The ceremony on Saturday at the Khondab heavy-water plant, which has been operating since 2004, was largely a symbolic gesture underlining Iran’s determination to ignore international pressure.

The UN deadline does not demand a halt to operations at the plant or a nearby reactor that Iran is building to use the heavy water, focusing on what is seen as the more urgent concern of uranium enrichment.

The West has repeatedly called on Iran to stop work at the heavy-water facility, fearing it could be used as a second track toward building warheads.

Heavy water contains a heavier hydrogen particle that allows a nuclear reactor to run on the natural uranium mined by Iran, without undergoing the enrichment process. But the spent fuel from a heavy-water reactor can be reprocessed to extract plutonium for use in a bomb.

Reactors fuelled by low-enriched uranium use regular – or light – water in the chain reaction that produces energy. But the process that produces such fuel can also enrich uranium to a higher level of purity that can be used to build a weapon.

On Tuesday, Iran responded to package of incentives from the Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany aimed at enticing it to halt enrichment. Tehran said it was willing to talk but would not agree to the West’s demand that it first suspend enrichment.

The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, will report to the Security Council on the state of Iran’s program by mid-September.

Meanwhile Iran today test-fired a sub-to-surface missile in the Persian Gulf during large-scale military exercises.

“The army successfully test-fired a top speed long-range sub-to-surface missile off the Persian Gulf,” the Army’s Navy commander, Gen. Sajjad Kouchaki, said on television.

A brief video clip showed the missile, fired from a submarine, hitting a target on the surface of the water within a kilometre.

The test came as part of large-scale military exercises under way throughout the country.