The Iranian authorities presented recently more than 100 achievements in the field of nuclear technology obtained during the last year. If by 2018, on the occasion of the National Day of Nuclear Technology, 83 achievements were announced, this year the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency (AEOI) surpassed itself and reported 114. Besides, the agency said it began to install advanced type centrifuges IR-6.
“The US policy of harassment cannot hamper our progress in the field of nuclear technology,” AEOI chief Ali Akbar Salehi said in a ceremony. The main Iranian advances were a control system to monitor atomic processes, two nuclear drugs, among them the Yttrium-90 material used for the treatment of cancer, a linear medical accelerator, and advances in the area of quantum physics and oxygen production -18. As for oxygen-18, Salehi’s top aide, Ali Asghar Zarean, explained that the research work took four years to get the final product and to be able to offer it to interested companies.
“The production capacity is 100 kilos per year. In this first phase we are producing 50, but our annual consumption is a few kilos less, so we dedicate ourselves to its export,” he explained. Iran is also willing to export centrifuges. According to Zarean, AEAI can design and manufacture locally “any centrifuge,” which are used in different industries, including the medical sector, and whose internal development was necessary because foreign companies do this type of trade with Iran. This week a network of 20 advanced IR-6 centrifuges was installed at the Natanz nuclear power plant, each of which, according to the analyst, equates to eight of the IR-1 project’s power.
Iranian President Hassan Rohani declared that Iran would unveil IR-8 centrifuge network shortly. Ali Akbar Salehi added that all new developments are in line with AEOI guidelines.
