AFP: The United States expressed concern Monday that Iran has reportedly begun transferring centrifuges that enrich uranium to the secretive Fordo plant.
WASHINGTON, August 22, 2011 (AFP) – The United States expressed concern Monday that Iran has reportedly begun transferring centrifuges that enrich uranium to the secretive Fordo plant.
“These reports are troubling,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
She recalled that UN Security Council resolutions require Iran to suspend uranium enrichment, while the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency demands Iran show transparency and cooperate with the probe into its nuclear program.
“The Iranian nuclear program offers no plausible reason for its existing enrichment of uranium up to nearly 20 percent, nor ramping up this production, nor moving centrifuges underground,” Nuland told reporters.
“And its failure to comply with its obligations to suspend its enrichment activities up to 3.5 percent and nearly 20 percent have given all of us in the international community reason to doubt its intentions,” she said.
Tehran’s nuclear chief Fereydoun Abbasi Davani was quoted by the Iranian state television website as saying that a batch of centrifuge machines have been transferred to the Fordo facility.
The Fordo plant was built secretly deep inside a mountain near the Shiite shrine city of Qom, some 150 kilometers (90 miles) south of Tehran.
