Iran unveiled on Tuesday a new uranium production facility and two extraction mines, only days after talks with world powers on its disputed nuclear programme again ended in deadlock.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lauded the advances and boasted of mastery over “the entire chain of nuclear energy,” while demanding that the work be accelerated.The announcements come after talks between sanctions-hit Iran and six world powers on Tehran’s nuclear drive failed to produce a breakthrough in the Kazakh city of Almaty on Friday and Saturday last week.

The mines in Saghand city operate 350 metres (yards) underground and are within 120 kilometres (75 miles) of the new yellowcake production facility at Ardakan, a city in the central province of Yazd, state television said. The report gave few details about the Ardakan facility but said it had an estimated output of 60 tonnes of yellowcake, which is an impure state of uranium oxide later fed into centrifuges for enrichment.

Iran says its enrichment activities are aimed at feeding a peaceful energy programme. That work, in defiance of repeated UN Security Council demands, is at the heart of international worries, with Western powers and Israel fearing the Islamic state is developing a capacity to build an atom bomb.
Diplomatic efforts to find a negotiated solution to the standoff have been underway for years, but to no avail.

Iran’s latest meeting in Almaty with the P5+1 group of powers - the Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany - failed to coax it into curbing its programme in exchange for the easing of some sanctions.Ahmadinejad, under whose presidency the atomic programme has expanded rapidly, on Tuesday praised the advances and urged nuclear scientists to step up their work.

“I demand you to speed up your work and without any interruption,” he said, while claiming mastery over “the entire chain of nuclear energy, one that no one can take it away”.“In the past, we depended on others to provide us with yellowcake but with the grace of God, (uranium) mines were inaugurated one after another,” he said referring to Iran’s all but depleted 600 tonnes of yellowcake acquired from South Africa in the 1970s. Iran says it has now managed to replenish the stockpile from its raw uranium reserve of 4,400 tonnes, according to official figures. In December 2010 it announced the delivery of a domestically produced yellowcake batch from the Gachin uranium mine, near the Gulf port of Bandar Abbas.

Meanwhile, Iran insisted on Tuesday it will not suspend its enrichment of uranium to 20pc nor will it ship out its existing stockpile - two keys demands of world powers in failed nuclear talks with Tehran. “We will continue to enrich uranium to 20pc purity as long as it is needed to fuel the Tehran research reactor,” atomic chief Feryedoon Abbasi Davani told reporters in remarks published by the ISNA news agency.Iran, he said, will neither “ship out its stockpile nor dilute the material” - which at 20 per cent purity is only a few technical steps short of bomb-grade enriched uranium.