Iran’s nukesSetback for Iran’s Nuclear Program after Mystery Fire at Centrifuge Assembly Site
New details of an Iranian nuclear facility damaged in a mysterious fire suggest Thursday’s incident is a much greater setback to Iran’s nuclear ambitions than Tehran has publicly admitted. The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security identified the facility as a centrifuge assembly workshop at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant in central Iran’s Isfahan province.
New details of an Iranian nuclear facility damaged in a mysterious fire suggest Thursday’s incident is a much greater setback to Iran’s nuclear ambitions than Tehran has publicly admitted.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security identified the facility as a centrifuge assembly workshop at the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant in central Iran’s Isfahan province.
In a series of Thursday tweets, the Institute showed how it used a photo of the fire-damaged building released earlier in the day by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) to geo-locate the site on Google Earth satellite images. The research group said it had previously identified the building as a centrifuge assembly workshop in 2017.
As well as releasing the photo of the damaged building, an AEOI spokesman gave an interview to an Iranian state TV reporter at the site, downplaying the fire as an “incident” that had done some damage to an above-ground workshop that he said was under construction. Behrouz Kamalvandi also said there had been no interruption to enrichment work involving centrifuges spinning underground.
“It took the Iranians a long time to build this workshop,” Institute researcher Sarah Burkhard told VOA Persian in an interview. “Its construction started in 2012 and they only got to a point where they could start operations there in 2018,” she said.
State TV network IRIB was given a tour of the facility, officially named the “Iran Centrifuge Assembly Center” just before it opened in June 2018. A video of the tour posted on YouTube showed an IRIB reporter doing a walk-through of the site, revealing what appeared to be brand new machinery in several small and large rooms.
“You can see that it was a very clean facility. And that’s important. It needs to be very clean,” Burkhard said. “You also can see that Iran was proud of this site.”
The AEOI’s photo of the aftermath of the fire, which it said happened at 2 a.m. Thursday local time, showed extensive damage to one end of the workshop, with roof panels charred, exterior walls cracked and doors ripped from their hinges, apparently from the force of an explosion.
