By Francois Murphy

VIENNA (Reuters – Iran expands its enrichment to uranium past the 20% threshold. The new activity will not result in keeping the product at the Natanz plant. It is currently enriching to 60%.

This move will likely help Iran improve its understanding of the enrichment process, something that Western powers usually condemn as irreversible. However, Iran won’t immediately be able to accelerate production of uranium enhanced to near weapons-grade since the product has not yet been collected.

However, it has prompted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to “increase frequency and intensity of its safeguards activities at the above ground Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz,” the IAEA reported in a Reuters report. Around 90% of uranium can be considered weapon-grade.

IAEA released a statement describing the findings. It stated that Iran told it about the changes made to its centrifuge setups at the plant. Iran would then feed any uranium that has been enriched up to 20% into a limited number of extra centrifuges and not collect the product.

“On 25 October 2021, the Agency verified that Iran began feeding (uranium hexafluoride gas) enriched up to 20% U-235 into a single IR-6 centrifuge in R&D line 2 at PFEP and that the resulting product and tails streams were being re-combined,” the IAEA report said, meaning that after separating the enriched product it was mixed with the centrifuge’s waste and not kept.

Iran said that it intended to feed the uranium up to 20% into single centrifuges as well as small- and medium-sized cascades of machines, but these were not currently being fed by the IAEA.

Iran has not yet announced a date for the resumption of talks in Vienna on the subject of restoring the 2015 nuclear accord under which it curbed nuclear activities in exchange to economic sanctions from U.S., EU, and U.N.

Trump, then-US President, abandoned the agreement in 2018, and reinstated harsh U.S. restrictions. A year later, Iran began to violate some limits of the agreement on uranium enrichment.