Iran Says It Triples Stockpile of 20 Percent-Enriched Uranium

Source: Bloomberg

By Ali Sheikholeslami

June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Iran said it now has 17 kilograms of 20 percent-enriched uranium, more than triple the amount that United Nations nuclear inspectors found there in April.

“We can potentially produce 5 kilograms (11 pounds) a month, but we are not in a rush,” Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who heads Iran’s atomic agency, was cited as saying today by the state-run Iranian Students News Agency. “Iran can enrich to any percentage it wants as its legitimate right.”

By September 2011, Iran will begin operating a plant to convert its 20 percent uranium into fuel to run a Tehran reactor that produces medical isotopes, Salehi said. Under a proposed international deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil on May 17, Iran had said it would swap some of its 3.5 percent-enriched uranium for imported fuel to run the reactor.

Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-23/iran-says-it-triples-stockpile-of-20-percent-enriched-uranium.html

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which is a bunch of criminal swine, but it does not follow that we ought to muck up the non-proliferation effort in a (so far completely counterproductive) effort to "get" them.

but the quest to control them here seems to supersede rational thought imo.