Iran slowing down uranium enrichment work: ElBaradei

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Iran has slowed the expansion of its disputed uranium enrichment program, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Monday, after Western powers threatened to hit Tehran with harsher sanctions.

The Iranian shift was detected by IAEA inspectors last week after months in which Iran accelerated the installation of centrifuge machines that refine uranium, an effort Western leaders suspect is covertly meant to yield atomic bombs.

The United States has said it, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China have begun deliberating a third and more painful batch of U.N. sanctions. Iran has condemned the first two imposed since December over its refusal to halt enrichment, insisting its program aims only at generating electricity.

IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei said agency inspectors who just revisited Iran's vast underground enrichment plant at Natanz also noticed a "fairly slow" pace of feeding uranium into the centrifuges for enrichment.

"We saw a slowing in the process of commissioning new cascades," he told reporters, referring to interlinked networks of centrifuges that spin at high speeds to refine uranium into nuclear fuel.

"It is not a full-size freeze, but it is a fairly marked slowdown... I hope at this delicate stage Iran will even freeze what they have (running)," he said after an IAEA meeting.

He said the slowdown was a step in the right direction and he likened it to an Iranian pledge to him last month to start producing answers to IAEA investigations meant to verify whether its program is wholly peaceful or military in nature.

© Reuters 2007

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