Iran's quest to develop nuclear energy dates back to 1957, when the United States began sending low-enriched uranium and nuclear technology to ally Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi for research purposes as part of President Dwight Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program. But Western powers started having second thoughts about the Iranian nuclear program even before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's embrace of nuclear power in the 1990s only hardened that opposition.
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Over the past decade, the West has grown increasingly convinced that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons under the guise of civilian atomic work, while Iran's leaders have insisted that they are simply diversifying their energy sources and developing fuel for medical research reactors.
The goal of enrichment, as this overview of the nuclear fuel cycle explains, is to increase the proportion of uranium-235 atoms -- "fissile isotopes" that can split in a chain reaction and produce heat -- within uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)'s most recent report on Iran's nuclear program found that, since 2010, the country has produced 320 pounds of fuel with uranium-235 concentrations of 20 percent -- a level that could enable Iran to quickly enrich the uranium to the weapons-grade threshold of 90 percent. (For perspective, natural mined ore has a uranium-235 concentration of 0.7 percent, and nuclear power plants typically run on 3.5 percent-enriched uranium.)
Understanding the dimensions of the Iranian nuclear program has never been more important than it is today, as Iran vows to continue enriching uranium and expanding its nuclear infrastructure in the face of harsh economic sanctions and U.N. Security Council resolutions to halt work, and U.S. and Israeli leaders, fearing that Iran is on the verge of atomic-weapons capability, threaten to check Tehran's nuclear advances by force if diplomacy fails. Here's a tour of the six facilities that you'll want to keep a close eye on as tensions with Iran escalate.
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