Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said on Monday that Iran continues to enrich uranium well beyond the needs for commercial nuclear use despite UN pressure to stop it.
Speaking to the Reuters news agency after he briefed EU foreign ministers on the subject, Grossi said that while the pace of uranium enrichment had slowed slightly since the end of last year, Iran was still enriching at an elevated rate of around 7 kg of uranium per month to 60% purity.
Enrichment to 60% brings uranium close to weapons grade, and is not necessary for commercial use in nuclear power production. Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons but no other state has enriched to that level without producing them.
Between June and November last year, Iran slowed down the enrichment to 3 kg per month, but jumped back up to a rate of 9 kg at the end of the year, the IAEA previously reported.
The increase came soon after Tehran barred a third of the IAEA's core inspections team, including the most experienced, from taking part in agreed monitoring of the enrichment process.
"This slowdown, speedup thing is like a cycle that for me does not alter the fundamental trend, which is a trend of constant increase in inventory of highly enriched uranium," Grossi told Reuters on Monday.
"There is a concerning rhetoric, you may have heard high officials in Iran saying they have all the elements for a nuclear weapon lately," he added.
He said the concern was all the higher because of what he termed current circumstances in the Middle East, a reference to tensions over Israel's war with Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza.
"We seem to be drifting apart... Iran says they are not getting incentives from the West, but I find this logic very complicated to understand because they should work with us... It should never be contingent on economic or other incentives," said the IAEA chief.
His comments come as a standoff between Iran and the West, over the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, continues.
Iran has scaled back its compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in response to former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018.
The Biden administration sought to return to the deal and held indirect talks with Iran on a return to compliance, but the negotiations reached a stalemate last September, after Iran submitted a response to a European Union proposal to revive the deal.
A US official later said that the efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal have “hit a wall” because of Iran's insistence on the closure of the UN nuclear watchdog's investigations into undeclared uranium in several sites.