Enter Iran's Parliament. Yesterday's news flash: Iran has announced plans to build 10--yes, that's ten!--new nuclear plants for enriching uranium. The Sydney Morning Herald carried details of the announcement from the Majlis, Iran's parliament:
State television reported on its website that Ahmadinejad's cabinet overwhelmingly ordered Iran's atomic body to begin building at five new sites earmarked for uranium enrichment plants and to locate sites for another five over the next two months.
The report said the Islamic republic plans to produce 20,000 megawatts of nuclear power which would be generated by building another 10 uranium enrichment plants the size of the one in the central city of Natanz.
"In order to produce 20,000 megawatts we need 500,000 centrifuges with the current capacity. But we have designed new centrifuges which have higher capacity, so we would require less centrifuges and as soon as they become operational we will use them," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.
"We have to reach the level to be able to produce between 250 and 300 tons of fuel per year in the country, and for this we need newer centrifuges with a higher speed."
A Wall Street Journal editorial notes that 500,000 centrifuges can filter enough enriched uranium to make 160 nuclear bombs per year--this is more than the size of Pakistan's entire nuclear arsenal.
Exit El-Baradei. Upon his exit from the chief position at the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Muhammad el-Baradei declared the Iran nuclear program investigation at a "dead end" after nearly a decade of probing. El-Baradei cited Iran's obstruction of IAEA efforts:
There has been no movement on remaining issues of concern which need to be clarified for the agency to verify the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program," El-Baradei told the opening session of the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors. "We have effectively reached a dead end, unless Iran engages fully with us."
Iran's idea of "engaging fully" is to reject the P 5 + 1 proposal (UN Big Five + Germany) that Iran ship 3/4 of its commercially-enriched uranium (3.5 - 5% enriched) to Russia for enriching to medical research level (19.75%, just shy of official baseline weapons-grade of 20% enrichment) and then processed in France, to be returned to Tehran. Instead, Iran wants uranium enriched outside, shipped to tehran, and THEN it will surrender and equivalent amount of its own stockpile. On Fox News, John Bolton rightly slammed el-Baradei for, in essence, covering his tail as he exits, after having aided Iran's protracted stall and evasion over the years. El-Baradei, recipient of another Nobel Peace Prize awarded for pseudo-peace efforts, has openly said he thinks it unfair that big nations have the bomb and Third World nations do not. Just what we need at the IAEA, a multiculturalist egalitarian.
Meanwhile, Iran has cracked down on schools as part of an "ideological soft war"; Iran also defends freezing financial assets of the 2003 Nobel laureate, human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi. Iranian officials have also seized Ebadi's medal. and replied to protests from the Norwegian Nobel Committee that the Norwegians should not (you guessed it) "interfere in Iran's internal affairs."
WSJ reporter Gerald F. Seib reports on the Victims of Iranian Censorship Act, which the Senate has passed, providing funding to enable Iranian dissenters to access US-controlled Internet proxy servers and thus circumvent Iranian censors; Team Obama is not happy.
Bottom Line. Iran's nuclear-aspirant, tyrannical regime marches on, the UN (as usual) dithers and The One in the White House continues to do what he does best: talk, talk & talk.
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