Iran said Monday it will start building a new site to enrich uranium by March. The planned plant is among 10 new sites that Iran approved last year. The announcement on state TV said the locations for the sites have been determined.
"Construction of a new uranium enrichment site will begin by the end of (the Iranian calendar) year (March 2011) or early next year," Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's atomic chief, said.
"The new enrichment facilities will be built inside mountains ... any of these sites will be capable of meeting the fuel needs of a nuclear power plant the size of the Bushehr facility," he told the TV.
Russia will begin loading fuel into the plant on Saturday with a view to it going online by the last weeks of September.
On his part, British Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman Steve Field said Monday that Salehi's announcement was a cause for concern. "The reports that we have seen this morning certainly do not give us any comfort that Iran is moving in the right direction," Field was quoted as saying by the AP.
