The Reuters story above details allegations that the Iranians are working on yet another covert uranium enrichment facility at Qazvin. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which is the group that exposed the Natanz Enrichment facility and the Arak Heavy Water Reactor, is the one that has made the claim. The Iranians are denying the allegations, and NCRI, while right on the money with and Arak, apparently does not have such a stellar record with respect to claims of improprieties by the Iranian government that these allegations are taken on face value. However, Iran’s behavior, with each its past deceptions and obfuscations, makes it difficult to believe they are after anything other than the bomb.
Iran has not accepted the Additional Protocols to their safeguards agreement, which would make it much easier to investigate because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would have greater options to request inspection of undeclared sites. If it is true that the plant is nearly 85% complete, and the IAEA were allowed to inspect, it would presumably be possible to tell whether the plant is optimized to making bomb-grade fissile material or not. The higher concentration of Uranium-235 in highly enriched uranium means that centrifuges have to be configured to avoid developing a critical mass at any given location. It will be interesting to see how Iran responds to investigation requests as it prepares to try to bring its first commercial Nuclear Power Plant on line.
Ahmadinejad will address the United Nations (UN) soon, no doubt to spew his usual brand of crazy.
Strategic Ramblings 
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