In the middle of busy Tehran, nuclear reactions continue apace.
But far removed, the government hopes, from an era of secretive nuclear development that isolated Iran from most of the world, this radiation is perfectly legal.
In an era of openness in Iran — at least relative to years past — the government is showing off its Tehran Research Reactor for the world to see.
Foreign and Iranian journalists, outfitted in white lab coats and blue protective foot coverings, were paraded around the 1960s-era reactor.
The building seems hardly changed from the day it was completed.
Its signs are in English and a heavy duty crane is stamped “Wien,” made in the Austrian capital.
Overhead, the ubiquitous portraits of two Supreme Leaders hang — the founding father Khomenei and the current leader Khamenei.
At the building’s center, a small cooling pond is lined, deceptively, with white tiles that wouldn’t be out of place at a swimming pool. Below 7.2 meters of bright blue water lie rectangular aluminum rods filled with uranium 235, enriched to 20%, far below the threshold for nuclear weapons.
“All Iranian-made,” a young tour guide who went only by Saeed, said.
“Every week,” he said, a group of students comes through; every month, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency inspect the operation.
A hard-won agreement with world powers, implemented last month, significantly limits Iran’s nuclear activities. But this reactor, used for research and to make radioactive pharmaceuticals, uses only low enriched uranium and so falls outside the scope of the agreement.
It’s just a “baby” reactor, Saeed said. At five megawatts, it produces no electricity, only radiation to make irradiated isotopes for use in medicine. (By comparison, he said, the reactor at Bushehr — now turned off — was 1,000 megawatts.)
The reactor, owned by the government, works hand in hand with the privately owned Pars Isotope Company. Through a series of vacuum tubes reminiscent of a bygone era, scientists send the isotopes, exposed to the uranium’s radiation, to lab technicians who ready them for hospitals not only in Iran, but India, Pakistan and Lebanon.