Iran has launched a second batch of centrifuges at its pilot nuclear fuel plant despite possible UN Security Council sanctions, diplomats said.
Tehran fired up the new cascade of 164 interconnected centrifuges, which can enrich uranium for either power plant or nuclear bomb fuel, earlier this month to go with an initial network of 164, they said.
But Iran appeared to be only testing the second cascade, without feeding "UF6" uranium gas into it, as it has generally done with the first cascade, which first yielded a tiny amount of home-grown enriched uranium in April.
A senior diplomat familiar with UN nuclear inspections in Iran said Tehran remained a long way from "industrial scale" capacity that would signal its emergence as a nuclear power, as North Korea showed on October 9 by detonating an atomic device.
"The second cascade was brought on line earlier this month but they appear to be just running it empty. That is, vacuum-testing to assess durability," said the diplomat, close to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.
"What they are not doing is building a stockpile of enriched uranium that would give them a bomb breakout ability, something like 100-200 kg (240-480 pounds). It is just a few grams here, a few grams there," he said.
There was no immediate comment on the centrifuges from Iran, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today that Western powers were wrong if they thought his country would retreat under political pressure from its nuclear plans.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said he was unable to confirm the action, but said Washington feared Iran was moving towards large-scale production.
"That would be something that would be quite alarming for the rest of the world because that means that you are able to start to produce -- or at least have the capability to produce -- large amounts of highly-enriched uranium which lead you to the building blocks for a nuclear weapon," he said.