Inspectors from the United Nations nuclear watchdog found uranium particles enriched up to 83.7% in Iran's underground Fordow nuclear site, a report seen Tuesday by The Associated Press said.
The confidential quarterly report by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency distributed to member states likely will renew tensions between Iran and the West over its program.
The IAEA report, which only speaks about "particles," suggests that Iran isn't building a stockpile of uranium enriched above 60% — the level it has been enriching at for some time.
Tensions have been growing since Bloomberg first reported on Feb. 19 that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency had detected uranium particles enriched up to 84% in Iran.
A spokesman for Iran's civilian nuclear program, Behrouz Kamalvandi, sought last week to portray any detection of uranium particles enriched to that level as a momentary side effect of trying to reach a finished product of 60% purity. However, experts say such a great variance in the purity even at the atomic level would appear suspicious to inspectors.
(Associated Press)