Vienna: The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Tuesday Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment site sustained “some recent damage” amid a US-Israeli airstrike campaign, though there was “no radiological consequence expected” from it.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said the damage was focused on “entrance buildings” to the underground portion of the atomic site.
The Natanz site, some 220 kilometres (135 miles) south of the capital, is a mix of above- and below-ground laboratories that did the majority of Iran’s uranium enrichment.
Before the war, the IAEA said Iran used advanced centrifuges there to enrich uranium up to 60 per cent — a short, technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90 per cent.
Some of the material is presumed to have been onsite when the entire complex was attacked last June.
The main above-ground enrichment building at Natanz was known as the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant. Israel hit the building on June 13, leaving it “functionally destroyed,” and seriously damaging underground halls holding cascades of centrifuges, the IAEA’s director-general,
Rafael Grossi, said at the time. A US follow-up attack on June 22 hit Natanz’s underground facilities with bunker-busting bombs, likely decimating what remained.
Addressing the special session of the Board of Governors, IAEA chief Rafael Mariano Grossi said that
“up to now” the International Atomic Energy Agency has “no indication that any of the nuclear installations.