As American and Iranian officials meet in Geneva to try to find a way through the impasse holding up a comprehensive multilateral deal onIran‘s nuclear programme, a group of Princeton University academics have sent them a proposed road-map on how to get around the blockage.
The Princeton report, published on the Arms Control Today website, focuses on the core issue that has proved most problematic in the four months of talks so far – Iran’s future capacity for enriching uranium. This has hitherto been such a gap to bridge because Iran and the West come at it from entirely different perspectives.
The Princeton compromise is a two-stage approach, allowing a very limited enrichment capacity for the existing research reactor in Tehran in the short term, but with the flexibility to expand that capacity to keep pace with the construction of future nuclear power stations in the long term. The existing contract for Russian nuclear fuel rods for Bushehr expires in 2021. If Tehran decides it wants to use it own rods after that, then its enrichment capacity would be stepped up as that deadline approaches, but not before 2019.
In the intervening five years, Iran would focus on modernising its enrichment plant, replacing the now ancient and inefficient IR-1 centrifuges, based on half-century old technology, with a new generation of IR-2m centrifuges, with about five times the capacity. As the new machines were installed in this first phase, total capacity would remain the same. Even more advanced centrifuges would be developed with an eye to the future.
“A compromise proposal for nuclear talks with Iran,” Interview with Hossein Mousavian, Julian Borger, The Guardian, June 9, 2014.
