Ahmadinejad to attend loading of own nuclear fuel rods in Tehran reactor.

Ahmadinejad to attend loading of own nuclear fuel rods in Tehran reactor.(JPost).Iran will load locally made nuclear fuel rods into its Tehran Research Reactor on Wednesday for the first time, a senior official told the Students News Agency ISNA."The first home-made nuclear fuel roads will be loaded in the Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor in the presence of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," said Ali Baqeri, deputy secretary general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, ISNA reported. The reactor is currently running out of nuclear fuel originally provided by Argentina in the 1990s."We will also send a reply to the EU's Foreign Policy Chief (on nuclear talks) today," he said.
The move appeared designed to show that increased sanctions are failing to halt Iran's technical progress and to strengthen its hand in any renewed negotiations with the major powers.
Diplomats believe Iran has in the past overstated its nuclear achievements to gain leverage in its standoff with Western powers, which suspect Iran is seeking to develop the means to make atom bombs, a charge the country denies."Fuel elements, for the first time created by Iranian scientists, will in the presence of the president ... be loaded into the Tehran research reactor," Bagheri, deputy secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, was quoted as saying.
Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he did not believe the Iranian announcement signaled any mass production of nuclear fuel.
"We are talking about laboratory-scale production of a single element for the reactor," he said.Read the full story here.