A new IAEA report out today says that Iran is rapidly increasing its stockpile of uranium which could be enriched into weapons grade material at any time.

But it gets worse:

The agency says that, as of this month, Tehran had amassed 630kg of low enriched uranium hexafluoride, up from 480kg in late August. Analysts say Iran is enriching uranium at such a pace that, by early next year, it could reach break-out capacity – one step away from producing enough fissile material for a crude nuclear bomb.

“They are moving forward, they are not making diplomatic overtures, they are accumulating low enriched uranium,” said Cliff Kupchan, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy in Washington. “These guys are committed to their nuclear programme: if we didn’t know that, they just told us again.”

Obama’s first real test as president will be how he handles the Iran nuclear situation. I’m hoping he realizes that Ahmadinejad is not going to give up his weapons program just because he sits across the table from him and yuks it up.

The Iranian regime is not rational and the only thing that is going to stop them besides going to war — is continuing economic pressure from the world community. Britain, France, and our other allies have all expressed concern that Obama is going to muck things up and unilaterally meet with the dictator.

Hopefully, Obama’s campaign promises to meet without preconditions was only rhetoric — but we shall see.

The U.S. has removed the last remnants of Iraq’s nuclear program in the form of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” uranium from the Tuwaitha nuclear complex outside Baghdad.

The Iraqi government sold the uranium to Canada for “tens of millions of dollars” and the U.S. delivered the material to Canada.

The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp. (CCJ), in a transaction the official described as worth “tens of millions of dollars.” A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors.

Even with the uranium gone, Iraq still has many radioactive “hot zones” leftover from Saddam’s regime. Nuclear waste and other materials were buried in concrete during Saddam’s reign and must be dug-out and removed. Both U.S. and Iraqi experts recently trained at the Chernobyl fallout zone in the Ukraine are participating in the clean up effort.