The UN’s nuclear watchdog said last year that Iran has increased the rate at which it is producing near-weapons grade uranium.
Iran began construction on four more nuclear power plants in the country’s south, with expected total capacity of 5,000 megawatts, the official IRNA news agency reported on Thursday.
Iran seeks to produce 20,000 megawatts of nuclear energy by 2041.Catch the complete coverage of Budget 2024 only on HT. Explore now!The country has one active nuclear power plant, a 1,000 megawatt plant that went online with help from Russia in 2011. It’s also building a 300-megawatt plant in oil-rich Khuzestan province, near the western border with Iraq.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog said last year that Iran has increased the rate at which it is producing near-weapons grade uranium.
Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in the report that Iran “in recent weeks had increased its production of highly enriched uranium, reversing a previous output reduction from mid-2023,” according to an IAEA spokesperson. Iran had previously slowed the rate at which it was enriching uranium to 60 per cent purity, which is just a short technical step away from the weapons-grade level of 90 per cent.