(Tribune News Service) — Israeli airstrikes dealt critical damage to a key Iranian nuclear facility, according to the United Nations atomic watchdog, likely setting back the Islamic Republic’s uranium fuel cycle by months.

The International Atomic Energy Agency reported that multiple Israel strikes against Iran’s uranium-conversion facility at Isfahan, 249 miles south of Tehran, resulted in serious damage.

Successfully knocking out Isfahan would be significant because it’s the only location for converting uranium into the feedstock used by centrifuges, which in turn separate the uranium isotopes needed for nuclear power or bombs.

Without capacity to convert new volumes of raw uranium, Iran’s ability to produce additional quantities of enriched product would be frozen. While Iran has ample stockpiles of existing material, its ability to scale up would be limited.

“If you interrupt that piece of the flow-sheet, the fuel cycle doesn’t work anymore,” said Robert Kelley, a U.S. nuclear engineer who led inspections for the IAEA in Iraq and Libya. “The front end of their program dies.”

Converting raw uranium involves mixing the ore with flourine, creating a highly corrosive feedstock. Highly specialized machines are needed to run the process. Unless Iran has spare gear in stock, Kelly suggested it may take significant time for Tehran to reboot its uranium fuel cycle.

The latest update from the IAEA shed further light on the extent of the destruction caused by Israel’s ongoing campaign against Iran. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi told the United Nations Security Council on Friday that while Israel destroyed surface facilities at Iran’s main nuclear-fuel site in Natanz, it hadn’t yet breached the primary underground halls where uranium enrichment takes place.

The risk for Netanyahu is that extending the military campaign could drive the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities deeper underground, ending access to U.N.-backed inspectors and potentially hardening Tehran’s resolve. Iran responded to the attacks by targeting Israeli cities with hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones from Friday evening.

Israel’s leaders will sift through the damage reports in coming days and decide whether to press ahead with the strikes. The campaign, a long-promised fulfillment of Netanyahu’s promise to target the nuclear program, also killed nine leading scientists whose expertise was crucial for Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“There’s obviously not yet a full assessment,” said Suzanne Maloney, a vice president at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. But the combination of strikes and the killing of key security and nuclear personnel is “going to make it very difficult for Iran to reconstitute the program to the level that it was at prior to these attacks,” she said.

Experts said the airstrikes will make it tougher to monitor Iran’s atomic activities, given U.N.-backed inspectors probably won’t be given access to sites for a long time. The attack is also unlikely to end Tehran’s nuclear program even if progress is slowed, according to Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association.

“There’s a real risk that Iran may divert uranium, enriched to near-weapons grade levels, to a covert location, or that due to the damage, the IAEA may not be able to account for all of Iran’s nuclear materials,” Davenport said.

Iran’s 880 pounds of highly-enriched uranium could fit in three or four easily-concealed cylinders, according to Robert Kelley, the nuclear-weapons engineer. Concern has mounted that Iran could use the material as the feedstock for a weapon, should it follow-through on threats to opt out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty — a global initiative to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons — and kick out inspectors.

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previous coverage

• Trump says Iran has ‘second chance’ to come to nuclear deal as Israel and Iran exchange blows
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