Iran Says Power Disruption Caused Incident at Nuclear Facility

(Bloomberg) --

Problems at a power distribution unit caused an incident at Iran’s largest uranium enrichment facility, a top nuclear official said on Sunday, soon after the country announced an increase in atomic activity at the site.

Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said the incident at the Natanz facility, which houses thousands of gas centrifuges, “caused no casualties or pollution” and an investigation was underway to determine the cause of the disruption, state TV reported. He said the issue was linked to electricity generation at the site but didn’t give more details.

Iran ramped up enrichment activity at Natanz as world powers are trying to agree on a U.S. return to the 2015 nuclear deal that curbed the Islamic Republic’s atomic activities in return for sanctions relief, before former President Donald Trump abandoned it three years ago.

On Saturday Iran said it had started injecting uranium gas into new centrifuge machines and started “mechanical testing” of new advanced centrifuges, called IR-9.

The latest disruption is the second suspicious incident at the facility in less than a year. Last July, an explosion and fire at Natanz caused significant damage to an outbuilding that contained an assembly line for centrifuge machines, officials said at the time, blaming sabotage and foreign interference.

In 2010, Natanz was the target of a major cyber attack using the Stuxnet computer virus that has been widely blamed on Israel and the U.S.

Israel, which fiercely opposes the nuclear deal, has also been blamed for several assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists inside the country over the past decade. The latest killing came in November, when the country’s most senior atomic expert died in a roadside ambush on the outskirts of Tehran.

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