‘Incident’ damages building near Iran nuclear plant; reactor said untouched

An “incident” has damaged an under-construction building near Iran’s Natanz nuclear power plant, but there was no damage to its reactor, a spokesman said Thursday.

Behrouz Kamalvandi made the comment in a report published by the state-run IRNA news agency.

He said authorities were investigating what happened.

Kamalvandi called the affected building an “industrial shed,” without elaborating.

There hasn’t been any previously announced construction work at Natanz, a uranium enrichment center some 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of the capital, Tehran. Natanz includes underground facilities buried under some 7.6 meters (25 feet) of concrete, which offer protection from airstrikes.

Natanz is among the sites now monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency after Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. The IAEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment over the incident.

The incident comes days after another mysterious explosion near Tehran.

The explosion, which rattled Iran’s capital on Friday, came from an area in its eastern mountains that analysts believe hides an underground tunnel system and missile production sites, satellite photographs showed Saturday.

Satellite photos of the area, some 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) east of downtown Tehran, showed hundreds of meters of charred scrubland not seen in images of the area taken in the weeks ahead of the incident. The building near the char marks resembled the facility seen in the state TV footage.

The area sits near what analysts describe as Iran’s Khojir missile facility. The explosion appears to have struck a facility for the Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group, which makes solid-propellant rockets, said Fabian Hinz, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies identified Khojir as the “site of numerous tunnels, some suspected of use for arms assembly.” Large industrial buildings at the site visible from satellite photographs also suggest missile assembly being conducted there.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency says Iran overall has the largest underground facility program in the Middle East.

Iranian officials themselves also identified the site as being in Parchin, home to a military base where the International Atomic Energy Agency previously said it suspects Iran conducted tests of explosive triggers that could be used in nuclear weapons. Iranian authorities blamed the blast on a gas leak.

Western concerns over the Iranian atomic program led to sanctions and eventually to Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. The US under President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the accord in May 2018, leading to a series of escalating attacks between Iran and the US, and to Tehran abandoning the deal’s production limits.

Separately, Iranian media reported Tuesday evening that an explosion from a gas leak in a medical clinic in northern Tehran had killed at least 19 people and injured several others. The ensuing fire broke out at Sina Athar Medical Center in Iran’s capital and state TV said firefighters battled and extinguished the blaze.