The United Nations nuclear watchdog quietly warned its member states in a report on Thursday that Iran once again breached the nuclear deal it signed in 2015 with world powers, and is using advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium.
The report does not appear on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) list of reports to the Board of Governors that are accessible by the public on the agency’s website.
“On 25 September 2019, the Agency verified that all of the (centrifuge) cascades already installed in R&D lines 2 and 3 … were accumulating, or had been prepared to accumulate, enriched uranium,” the International Atomic Energy Agency said in the report to member states obtained by Reuters.
Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal signed in 2015 with Tehran, Iran is allowed to accumulate enriched uranium with just over 5,000 of its first-generation IR-1 centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment facility. Small numbers of the more advanced centrifuges were to be used for research, but without producing enriched uranium. The deal also capped the amount of enriched uranium that could be produced, and the purity to which it can be enriched.
Tehran has already breached both of those limits as well.