Tehran Believes Moscow Will Not Give Up Fordow Revamp Work Over US Sanctions

TEHRAN (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th December, 2019) Tehran thinks that US sanctions will not be able to press Moscow into abandoning the project of repurposing work at Iran's Fordow nuclear facility, a spokesman for the Islamic republic's Atomic Energy Organization said.

The US is set to terminate its sanctions waiver regarding the Fordow nuclear facility starting from December 15. It comes after Tehran resumed uranium enrichment activities at the plant in November as part of the fourth stage of curtailing its nuclear commitments in the wake of US unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.

"We believe that Russia will not withdraw [from the project] due to the US termination of sanctions waiver," Behrouz Kamalvandi said, as quoted by the ISNA news agency.

Russia's nuclear fuel company TVEL, a subsidiary of state nuclear corporation Rosatom, in accordance with the Iran nuclear deal, has been working on the project to modify two cascades of gas centrifuges at the Fordow plant to enable production of stable (non-radioactive) tellurium and xenon isotopes for medical purposes since 2017.

On Thursday, TVEL announced that it had suspended the project, saying that the start of uranium enrichment at the facility made it technologically impossible to implement the work.

The next day, Rosatom said that it would renew its work at the Fordow facility once technical solutions were found.