Iran Plans to Install New Generation of Home-Made Centrifuges Soon

Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Fereidoon Abbasi announced that the country’s experts have managed to produce a new generation of centrifuge machines with a higher quality, adding that the first cascade of these machines will be installed in Iran’s nuclear facilities soon.
“We are working on a new generation of centrifuges and we have ended the phase of research,” Abbasi told reporters after a cabinet meeting here in Tehran today.

“We will install the first 164-set cascade of the new generation centrifuges soon” and will make them operational after attaining the desired results, he added.

Earlier, the AEOI officials had announced that Iranian scientists have managed to design a first sample of the third generation of home-made centrifuges.

“Our skillful colleagues at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran have succeeded in designing third-generation machines thanks to God,” former head of the AEOI Ali Akbar Salehi declared in April 2010.

“The (third-generation) machines have accomplished their mechanical tests. We expect that God willing the machines would show the separation capacity of approximately 10 after the upcoming phase of gas injection,” the official stressed at the time.

“That capacity is almost 6 times more that the separation capacity in the first generation machines,” Salehi continued.

Experts speculate that the new generations of Iran-made centrifuges would enable Tehran to enrich uranium over the current purity level of 5 percent.

Uranium enriched to the purity levels between 3.5 and 5 percent is used for fueling nuclear power plants, while 20-percent enriched uranium is used in the production of radioisotopes for medicinal use. Production of nuclear bombs needs highly-enriched (over 90 percent) uranium.