IAEA Chief to Visit Tehran in Coming Days

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi will travel to Tehran in the coming days following an invitation by the Islamic Republic’s nuclear chief Mohammad Eslami, a senior official said. 
“Complementary information about the trip will soon be shared with the media,” Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said, ISNA reported.
He hoped that the visit would pave the way for further cooperation and a brighter prospect of relations between Iran and the IAEA. 
Iranian nuclear officials held discussions with an IAEA delegation headed by the head of the agency’s safeguards department Massimo Aparo over the past days, which Kamalvandi described as “constructive and promising”. 
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who was meeting his Finnish counterpart in Geneva on Monday, also pointed to good discussions with the agency’s delegation, making Grossi’s upcoming visit public. 
He hoped that good progress would be made on technical issues in the absence of political pressure on the IAEA. 
Reports came out last week suggesting that the agency has found uranium enriched to 84% in Iran, very close to weapons grade which is around 90%.
The IAEA said on Twitter that it was aware of recent media reports and that it was discussing the results of recent verifications with Iran and would inform the IAEA Board of Governors as appropriate. 

Iran dismissed the report as a political attempt to impose further pressure on the country, pointing out that other levels of purity may naturally be produced as a by-product in the enrichment process. 
Kamalvandi said finding highly-enriched uranium particles in the pipes connecting centrifuges is “normal”, stressing that the end product is what matters.
The AEOI chief later announced that officials from the agency were in Tehran to visit, check and negotiate over ambiguities that he said were created as a result of an inspector’s “misinterpretation”.
Earlier this month, the agency had also criticized Iran for failing to inform it of a “substantial” change to the interconnections between the two cascades, or clusters, of centrifuges enriching uranium to up to 60% at the Fordow enrichment plant. 
Kamalvandi said in an interview later that the agency was informed of the “mistake” by the inspector, who came back for another inspection and confirmed that Iran had not made any such changes. 
Iran has been enriching uranium to up to 60% purity since April 2021, above the 3.67% cap imposed by the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in return for sanctions relief.  
The measure was part of Iran’s countermeasures against the United States’ reimposition of sanctions, after its withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018. 
Iranian officials say despite exceeding JCPOA limits, the country’s nuclear activities are still in compliance with the safeguards agreement. 
As per the safeguards, what the agency should monitor is the amount and method of using atomic materials, according to Kamalvandi.
“The safeguards has nothing to do with centrifuges, it has nothing to do with research, it should not have anything to do with … the sites where you don’t have original atomic materials,” he had earlier said.
He had also noted that based on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and safeguard regulations, Iran reserves the “right to produce whatever percentage it wants.”
Tehran denies any plan to develop an atomic bomb, maintaining that its nuclear activities are exclusively for peaceful purposes, such as the production of fuel and radiopharmaceuticals.