Iran's nuclear chief, Dr. Ali Akbar Salehi, Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, in Tehran, in an interview on Press TV. Photo: Screenshot / Press TV.

Iran’s nuclear chief, Dr. Ali Akbar Salehi,  Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, in Tehran, took umbrage with calls to “dismantle” the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, in a two-part interview with semi-official state news television Press TV on Tuesday. In the lengthy interview Salehi declared that rather than being dismantled, “The entire nuclear activity of Iran is going on.”

“If you look at the word ‘dismantle’ and you look at it in the dictionary, dismantle means to take apart and try to put it into pieces, equipment,” Salehi said, according to a Press TV transcript of the interview that was conducted in English. “Well, you can come and see whether our nuclear sites, nuclear equipment and nuclear facilities are dismantled or not. The only thing we have stopped and suspended – and that is voluntarily – is the production of 20 percent enriched uranium and that’s it.”

“Of course, there is another thing that we have undertaken; we have committed ourselves not to install main equipment, which have been defined as to what those main equipments are in the Arak 40 megawatt heavy water reactor.”

“The nuclear facilities are functioning; our enrichment is proceeding, it’s doing its work, it’s producing the 5 percent enriched uranium and those centrifuges that stopped producing the 20 percent will be producing 5 percent enriched uranium. In other words our production of 5 percent [uranium] will increase. The entire nuclear activity of Iran is going on.”

Salehi told the interviewer that the recent Geneva agreement with world powers allows Iran to switch over all of its centrifuges working to make 20 percent enriched uranium to produce to the 5 per cent threshold.

He said the agreement does not impact Iran’s ability to develop even more efficient centrifuges, which it is working on now, and would test run for two years before putting them into mass production.

On Iran’s enrichment facilities, Salehi said: “You see, we have two sites for enrichment, one is at Natanz and the other one is at Fordo. Out of the 18,000 centrifuges that we have roughly, 9,000 of them are working, are functioning; and the other 9,000 we have voluntarily accepted not to inject gas into them.”

The interviewer asked: “You were not injecting gas before the joint action plan so the situation has not changed?”

“Yes. That was a political decision that was made in the previous government and that decision is still upheld,” Salehi responded.

Then he asked him to clarify: “So technically speaking the Americans have not achieved anything in terms of stopping the injection of gas into those centrifuges?”

“No, except we can say that we have agreed to extend this moratorium on not injecting gas into the centrifuges for another six months,” the nuclear chief said.

In terms of nuclear power plants, Salehi said Iran currently operates the 1,000 megawatt (MW) Bushehr plant and has a 1992 agreement with Russia to build up to 4,000 MW of nuclear capacity in Iran. He said details of the Russia plan are still being negotiated, but he hopes construction, which could take seven to eight years, could begin next year. Domestically, he said Iran is working on developing its own 360 MW plant.

In the second part of the interview, Salehi described Iran’s heavy water reactor, Arak, which he classified as a research reactor “for the purpose of producing radio-isotopes and making other tests: fuel tests, material tests. So many other tests that you can use this reactor and make those tests; use the neutrons and make many different tests with the neutrons emanated from the core of this reactor.”

But he claimed that while Iran’s Bushehr plant also produces plutonium, neither can do so in the quantity and at the refinement level required to create weapons-grade fuel.

He said it will take two more years to finish building the Arak reactor, plus a year of testing, a year for the fuel to be used, and a year for it to cool, meaning, “It takes six, seven, eight years before we are able – if we intend to use the plutonium – to extract the plutonium. Seven to eight years and plus you need a reprocessing plant, which we don’t have and we don’t intend to construct.”

At the end of the interview, Press TV asked, “Let’s go back to November 24th, 2013 when Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany reached the so-called Geneva deal. As a nuclear scientist and MIT Graduate and, more importantly, as Iran’s nuclear chief, what was your first reaction?”

Saleh began to answer, then changed direction: “I was happy that both sides reached, I mean, took the first step in a one thousand mile journey.”

Watch the Press TV interview below: