Iran’s Nuke Facility Hit With Mysterious Total Blackout

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‘Mossad behind cyber attack against Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility’

Iran’s Natanz nuke facility hit with mysterious total blackout

Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility suffered a suspicious power outage on Sunday, a day after it started up new advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges.

By: Military News, April 10, 2021:

On Sunday, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s civilian nuclear program has called a blackout an act of “nuclear terrorism.”

The Associated Press reported that shortly after news of the power outage broke, several Israeli news outlets reported the same claim that the underground nuclear facility was disrupted by a cyberattack. According to the Associated Press, the Israeli outlets reportedly did not provide sourcing for the cyberattack assessment, though Israeli media often have close ties with Israel’s military and intelligence community, raising the possibility that Israel was connected to the outage.

The outage comes days after U.S. and Iranian delegations arrived in Vienna, Austria to being indirect talks about returning to compliance with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal. Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Iran deal in 2018 and Iran has since breached its own commitments to the deal by exceeding uranium stockpile and enrichment limits.

Israeli officials have previously warned Israel’s forces could attack Iran if the U.S. eases sanctions against Iran or rejoins Iran nuclear deal.

On Saturday, Iran announced it had spun up numerous advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, including 164 IR-6 centrifuges at Natanz. Iran also began testing its new IR-9 centrifuge, which could potentially enrich uranium 50 times faster than Iran’s first-generation IR-1 centrifuges. Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran is limited to using only IR-1s for enrichment.

It is unclear to what degree the power outage caused damage or disruption to Iran’s nuclear program.

Behrouz Kamalvandi, the spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization said the power was cut across the facility, the Associated Press reported.

“We still do not know the reason for this electricity outage and have to look into it further,” Kamalvandi said. “Fortunately, there was no casualty or damage and there is no particular contamination or problem.”