IAEA writing report on Egyptian nuclear reporting failures

VIENNA, Feb 4 (AFP) - The UN atomic agency is writing a report on its investigation of suspicous atomic activity in Egypt, diplomats said Friday, with Cairo already admitting it failed to tell the agency about some research experiments.
The report will be submitted to a meeting that opens in Vienna February 28 of the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-nation board of governors.
The IAEA is "writing a report, yes," a diplomat close to the agency told AFP, confirming that Egypt's nuclear program will now be a special topic of consideration at the board meeting.
The diplomat said "there are a number of little failures" in honoring international safeguards to report.
Egypt had admitted January 27 to failing to signal a "number of research experiments" to the IAEA, after diplomats said the agency was investigating an Egyptian lab that could be used to make plutonium, a nuclear weapons material.
But "Egypt is cooperating with the IAEA" and feels the "research experiments and activities ... most of which took place in the distant past are consistent with the NPT," the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Egyptian embassy had said in a statement released in Vienna.
The statement said stronger safeguards measures by the IAEA "since the 1990s have resulted in not reporting to the agency, in an appropriate and timely manner, a number of research experiments and activities."
Egyptian ambassador Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy told AFP it was a case that with "strengthened safeguards, countries sometimes don't know what they are required to report."
He said news reports of Egyptian safeguards failures were "exaggerated" and that Egypt has a strictly peaceful nuclear program.
IAEA officials refused to comment on the investigation.
IAEA inspectors have been checking out a reprocessing lab for making plutonium, diplomats said.
The reprocessing laboratory is at Egypt's Inshass center, 35 kilometres (20 miles) northeast of Cairo, where there are two research reactors.
The lab consists of "hot laboratories, procured from France in the early 1980s, which allow for treatment of spent fuel and laboratory-scale plutonium separation," a diplomat said.
But another diplomat close to the IAEA said Egypt's undeclared work was small scale and not even comparable to South Korea, a non-atomic-weapons state which has admitted carrying out rogue nuclear experiments.
The IAEA has been intensively investigating Egypt since the middle of 2004 after it was tipped off to possible undeclared nuclear experiments, with much information coming from open-source scientific publications by Egyptian scientists, a diplomat said.
The experiments the IAEA is looking into involve making uranium metal, which could be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, and carrying out the first steps of uranium enrichment by making uranium tetrafluoride (UF4), the diplomat said.

02/04/2005 16:53 GMT - AFP