The United Kingdom, the United States and Australia have “gone further down a wrong and dangerous road” with their nuclear submarines agreement, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said Tuesday.
The agreement “completely ignored the concerns of the international community,” Wang Wenbin said at a press briefing, according to CNN.
The deal will “stimulate an arms race, undermine the international nuclear non-proliferation system and damage regional peace and stability,” he added.
On Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden announced his intention to sell five nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, after meeting with the British and Australian prime ministers at a naval base in San Diego, California.
The move is part of the broader “AUKUS” alliance, which aims at strengthening the U.S., British and Australian presence in the Indo-Pacific — mostly to counter the rise of China in the region.
Asked Monday if China would consider the submarines deal as an act of aggression, Biden said “no,” according to Reuters.
Responding to the remarks for the Chinese foreign ministry, a spokesperson for U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Tuesday: “The AUKUS program is not about any one country.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Tehran: Iran has allowed increased inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of its nuclear sites, the official news agency IRNA reported Sunday, just after the IAEA chief’s two-day visit to Tehran.
In an interview with IRNA published on Sunday, Behrouz Kamalvandi, the spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), said the IAEA inspections of Iran’s Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP) have now increased to 11 from eight, commenting on the reports of a 50-per cent rise in the IAEA’s inspections of Iranian nuclear sites, Xinhua News Agency reported.
Since uranium enrichment to a 60-per cent level recently started at FFEP, inspections of the site should increase according to the safeguards agreements, Kamalvandi explained.
“Basically, any rise in the enrichment level at or entry of more sensitive materials into nuclear facilities lead to an increase in the inspections according to what the two sides agreed upon,” he said.
However, no agreement was reached between IAEA and AEOI regarding the installation of new surveillance cameras at Iranian nuclear sites, Kamalvandi noted.
Kamalvandi also ruled out “unlimited access” for the IAEA to three sites where the agency was reported to have “detected traces of uranium,” saying the international nuclear watchdog made no such request.
In a joint statement issued at the end of IAEA’s Director General Rafael Grossi’s visit on Saturday, the AEOI and IAEA said they have reached a consensus that their interactions should be carried out “in a spirit of collaboration and in full conformity with the competencies of the IAEA and Iran’s rights and obligations.”
In recent months, the IAEA had criticized Iran for its lack of cooperation with the agency.
In November last year, the IAEA’s Board of Governors passed a resolution proposed by the US, Britain, France and Germany that called on Iran to collaborate with the agency’s investigators regarding “uranium traces.”
Iran has repeatedly rejected such allegations and emphasized the peaceful nature of its nuclear programme.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Tehran: Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has said that he hopes the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) can adopt a “professional” approach to the Iranian nuclear issue and prevent certain countries from affecting the nuclear watchdog’s decisions.
Raisi made the remarks on Saturday in a meeting with visiting Director General of the IAEA Rafael Grossi in the capital Tehran, according to a report on the website of the president’s office.
Countries like Israel and the US use the nuclear issue as an “excuse” to further pressure the Iranian people, said the President, pointing out that it was the US that violated the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, Xinhua news agency reported.
Iran has had “the highest level” of cooperation with the IAEA, expects the agency to tell the truth about Iran’s nuclear programme as well the country’s commitment ot its regulations, he noted.
Meanwhile, the IAEA Chief expressed pleasure at visiting Iran and meeting the country’s President, saying the IAEA’s team led by himself had “constructive and positive” meetings with the Iranian side, according to the report.
Grossi arrived in Tehran on Friday for a two-day visit, during which he also held talks with Mohammad Eslami, President of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
In recent months, the IAEA has criticised Iran for its lack of cooperation with the agency.
In November 2020, the IAEA’s Board of Governors passed a resolution proposed by the US, Britain, France and Germany that called on Iran to collaborate with the agency’s investigators regarding the alleged “traces of uranium” at a number of its “undeclared” sites.
Iran has repeatedly rejected such allegations and emphasised the peaceful nature of its nuclear programme.
Iran pledged to re-install monitoring equipment at its nuclear facilities and to assist an investigation into uranium traces detected at undeclared sites, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear agency said Saturday after a visit to Tehran.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and other top officials in Tehran on Saturday.
“Over the past few months, there was a reduction in some of the monitoring activities” related to cameras and other equipment “which were not operating,” Grossi told reporters upon his return to Vienna. “We have agreed that those will be operating again.”
A joint statement issued on Saturday by the IAEA and Iran’s nuclear agency included assurances that Tehran would address long-standing complaints about access to its disputed nuclear program. But the text went into little detail, and similar promises by Iran have yielded little in the past.
“Iran expressed its readiness to continue its cooperation and provide further information and access to address the outstanding safeguards issues,” according to the joint statement.
“These are not words. This is very concrete,” Grossi said of the assurances he received in Tehran, the Associated Press reported.
The visit to Iran followed a recent report from the IAEA, seen by CNN and other media, that confirmed that uranium particles enriched to 83.7 percent purity, close to the 90 percent needed to make a nuclear bomb, were found at an Iranian nuclear site. The report raised concerns that Tehran was speeding up its enrichment.
Grossi said the Iranians had agreed to increase inspections at that site by 50 percent, the AP reported.
Iran also will allow the re-installation of extra monitoring equipment that had been put in place under the 2015 nuclear deal, but then removed last year as the agreement fell apart, Reuters reported.
The 2015 deal gave Tehran relief from most international sanctions as long as it allowed the U.N. watchdog to monitor its nuclear activities. But it began to unravel after the U.S.’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump.
Iran also “will allow the IAEA to implement further appropriate verification and monitoring activities,” according to Saturday’s joint statement. “Modalities will be agreed between the two sides in the course of a technical meeting which will take place soon in Tehran,” it said.
Grossi said there was a “marked improvement” in his dialogue with Iranian officials, according to the AP. “I hope we will be seeing results soon. We will see.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
“The collective attitude of the West” led by the United States needs to change towards Moscow, Peskov told Izvestia daily in an interview.
“The security of one country cannot be guaranteed at the expense of the security of another,” Peskov said“.
Last week, President Vladimir Putin issued a warning to the West about the war in Ukraine and announced Russia’s decision to suspend its participation in the recent START treaty after accusing the West of direct involvement in attempts to strike its strategic air bases..
\"The security of one country cannot be guaranteed at the expense of the security of another,\" Peskov said<\/span>\".<\/span><\/p>
Last week, President Vladimir Putin issued a warning to the West about the war in Ukraine and announced Russia's decision to suspend its participation in the recent START treaty after accusing the West of direct involvement in attempts to strike its strategic air bases.<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>
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( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )
Tehran: Iran’s atomic chief has said that the country seeks to export its nuclear products and technology amid the “propaganda warfare” conducted by enemies to block the country’s progress in the nuclear field.
President of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Mohammad Eslami made the remarks at the 29th Iranian Nuclear Conference at Shahid Beheshti University on Sunday, Xinhua news agency reported, citing Iran’s Mehr News Agency.
Eslami said the country seeks to export its nuclear products and technology, adding that Iran is currently exporting radiopharmaceuticals and some types of nuclear equipment.
He also referred to the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and attacks on Iranian nuclear sites as measures taken by Iran’s enemies to impede the progress of Iran’s nuclear technology.
The US and its Western allies have accused Iran of developing a nuclear weapon, and Washington has imposed sanctions on Tehran aiming to stop its nuclear activities.
Iran rejects the allegation as “baseless” and sanctions as “illegal”, saying its nuclear program is peaceful and the country has never sought to develop a nuclear weapon.
Tehran: The Iranian nuclear chief has said the officials of the IAEA are in Tehran and have been inspecting the country’s nuclear facilities since two days to resolve the ambiguities.
Mohammad Eslami, President of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), on Wednesday made the remarks to reporters on the sidelines of a cabinet meeting, noting Tehran is continuing its cooperation and relations with the IAEA within the framework of the safeguards agreements, according to Iranian Students’ News Agency.
Answering a question about the claim in a recent Bloomberg report that “Iran is enriching uranium to levels above 60 per cent,” Eslami noted that it was due to a misperception by one of the inspectors.
He said Iran is always careful to prevent any new ambiguity in the process of cooperation with the IAEA, Xinhua news agency reported.
Turning to a 2015 nuclear deal, Eslami added the agreement was a contract between Iran and the P5+1 based on efforts to build mutual trust, adding that it is quite “unacceptable” to Iran that a political pressure campaign would seek to force Tehran into fulfilling its commitments one-sidedly while others are not honouring theirs.
Bloomberg’s Sunday report cited two senior diplomats as claiming that IAEA inspectors in Iran last week detected uranium enriched to 84 per cent purity, “just 6 per cent below that needed for a nuclear weapon.”
On Sunday, Iranian official news agency IRNA quoted the AEOI spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi as saying that the Bloomberg report was a “distortion of the facts” and part of a smear campaign.
Over the past few months, the IAEA has criticised Iran for its lack of cooperation with the agency. On November 17, 2022, the IAEA’s Board of Governors passed a resolution proposed by the US, Britain, France, and Germany that called on Iran to collaborate with the agency’s investigators regarding the alleged “traces of uranium” at a number of its “undeclared” sites.
Europe is on track to kick its addiction to Russian fossil fuels, but can’t seem to replicate that success with nuclear energy a year into the Ukraine war.
The EU’s economic sanctions on Russian coal and oil permanently reshaped trade and left Moscow in a “much diminished position,” according to the International Energy Agency. Coal imports have dropped to zero, and it is illegal for Russian crude to be imported by ship; only four countries still receive it by pipeline.
That’s compared to the bloc getting 54 percent of its hard coal imports and one-quarter of its oil from Russia in 2020.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to turn off the gas taps while the EU turned increasingly to liquefied natural gas deliveries from elsewhere caused the reliance on Moscow to tumble from 40 percent of the bloc’s gas supply before the war to less than 10 percent now.
But nuclear energy has proved a trickier knot for EU countries to untie — for both historical and practical reasons.
As competition in the global nuclear sector atrophied following the Cold War, Soviet-built reactors in the EU remained locked into tailor-made fuel from Russia, leaving Moscow to play an outsized role.
In 2021, Russia’s state-owned atomic giant Rosatom supplied the bloc’s reactors with 20 percent of their natural uranium, handled a quarter of their conversion services and provided a third of their enrichment services, according to the EU’s Euratom Supply Agency (ESA).
That same year, EU countries paid Russia €210 million for raw uranium exports, compared to the €88 billion the bloc paid Moscow for oil.
The value of imports of Russia-related nuclear technology and fuel worldwide rose to more than $1 billion (€940 billion) last year, according to research from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). In the EU, the value of Russia’s nuclear exports fell in some countries like Bulgaria and the Czech Republic but rose in others, including Slovakia, Hungary and Finland, RUSI data shared with POLITICO showed.
“While it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions from what is ultimately a time-limited and incomplete dataset, it does clearly show that there are still dependencies on, and a market for, Russian nuclear fuel,” said Darya Dolzikova, a research fellow at RUSI.
Although uranium from Russia could be replaced by imports from elsewhere within a year — and most nuclear plants have at least one-year extra reserves, according to ESA head Agnieszka Kaźmierczak — countries with Russian-built VVER reactors rely onfuel made by Moscow.
“There are 18 Russian-designed nuclear power plants in [the EU] and all of them would be affected by sanctions,” said Mark Hibbs, a senior fellow at Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. “This remains a deeply divided issue in the European Union.”
That’s why the bloc has struggled over the past year to target Russia’s nuclear industry — despite repeated calls from Ukraine and some EU countries to hit Rosatom for its role in overseeing the occupied Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and possibly supplying equipment to the Russian arms industry.
“The whole question of sanctioning the nuclear sector … was basically killed before there was ever a meaningful discussion,” said a diplomat from one EU country who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The most vocal opponent has been Hungary, one of five countries — along with Slovakia, Bulgaria, Finland and the Czech Republic — to have Russian-built reactors for which there is no alternative fuel so far.
Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have signed contractswith U.S. firm Westinghouse to replace the Russian fuel, according to ESA chief Kaźmierczak, but the process could take “three years” as national regulators also need to analyze and license the new fuel.
The “bigger problem” across the board is enrichment and conversion, she added, due to chronic under-capacity worldwide. It could take “seven to 10 years” to replace Rosatom — and that timeline is conditional on significant investments in the sector.
While Finland last year scrapped a deal to build a Russian-made nuclear plant on the country’s west coast — prompting a lawsuit from Rosatom — others aren’t changing tack.
Slovakia’s new Mochovce-3 Soviet VVER-design reactor came online earlier this month, which Russia will supply with fuel until at least 2026.
Russia’s nuclear energy was not initially included in EU sanctions over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine | Eric Piermont/AFP via Getty Images
Hungary, meanwhile, deepened ties with Moscow by giving the go-ahead to the construction of two more reactors at its Paks plant last summer, underwritten by a €10 billion Russian loan.
“Even if [they] were to come into existence, nuclear sanctions would be filled with exemptions because we are dependent on Russian nuclear fuel,” said a diplomat from a second EU country.
This article has been updated with charts depicting Russia’s nuclear exports.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
The treaty is the last remaining nonproliferation agreement between the pair after another key nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, expired in 2019.
On Tuesday, Putin announced that he’s suspending Moscow’s participation after accusing the U.S. of being involved in attempting to strike bases in Russia. He stopped short of a complete withdrawal, however.
Putin made the remarks the same day Biden was in Poland to give a speech marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and one day after he made a surprise visit to Kyiv.
The U.S. in January accused Russia of not complying with the treaty by not allowing the United States and NATO to inspect its nuclear facilities. The pact includes limits on systems such as intercontinental ballistic missiles and deployed nuclear warheads.
“When the administration started, we extended New START because it was clearly in the security interest in our country and actually in the security interests of Russia,” Blinken said. “And that only underscores what an irresponsible action this is.”
“Of course, we remain ready to talk about strategic arms limitations at any time with Russia,” Blinken added, “irrespective of anything else going on in the world.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The treaty is the last remaining nonproliferation agreement between the pair after another key nuclear accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, expired in 2019.
On Tuesday, Putin announced that he’s suspending Moscow’s participation after accusing the U.S. of being involved in attempting to strike bases in Russia. He stopped short of a complete withdrawal, however.
Putin made the remarks the same day Biden was in Poland to give a speech marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and one day after he made a surprise visit to Kyiv.
The U.S. in January accused Russia of not complying with the treaty by not allowing the United States and NATO to inspect its nuclear facilities. The pact includes limits on systems such as intercontinental ballistic missiles and deployed nuclear warheads.
“When the administration started, we extended New START because it was clearly in the security interest in our country and actually in the security interests of Russia,” Blinken said. “And that only underscores what an irresponsible action this is.”
“Of course, we remain ready to talk about strategic arms limitations at any time with Russia,” Blinken added, “irrespective of anything else going on in the world.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
