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Inspectors to press Iran on claimFrom National Security Correspondent David Ensor  Iran's Natanz nuclear complex is about 300 kilometers south of the capital. RELATEDYOUR E-MAIL ALERTSWASHINGTON (CNN) -- A team of nuclear inspectors will press Iran this week about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's assertion that Iran is now in the process of researching and testing a more powerful uranium-enrichment centrifuge technology known as P-2. An official at the International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday that Ahmadinejad's claim, made in a speech last week, would be a key area for the inspectors. P-2 centrifuges, with their superstrong rotors, enrich uranium faster, and could help Iranian scientists construct a nuclear weapon much sooner than the P-1 centrifuges they have shown to international inspectors. Ahmadinejad said Iran is "now under the process of research and testing" of P-2 technology, but it was not clear from his statement whether he was saying Iran already has P-2 centrifuges. IAEA officials said the subject of P-2 work never came up during last week's meetings between IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and Iranian officials. The team, which is scheduled to inspect nuclear facilities at Natanz, is to be led by Olli Heinonen of Finland, the agency's deputy director general and head of the Department of Safeguards. Until now, Iranian officials have said that they stopped all work on P-2 technology years ago after receiving blueprints for a centrifuge from the black-market syndicate run by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan in 1994. The official said the team will also seek clarification on a number of other "mysterious gaps" in the evidence concerning Iran's nuclear program during the roughly 17 years when Iranian officials lied about it, and concealed the work from the world. White House reaction"Undisclosed work on P-2 centrifuges would be a further violation of Iran's safeguard obligations, in addition to those that have already been identified by the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday. "Such violations and failures by the regime to comply with its international obligations run contrary to the regime's claims that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes." B.S.A. Tahir, a Khan associate now in prison in Malaysia, has been reported as saying Iran received far more P-2 technology than it has acknowledged. U.S. intelligence officials estimate, based on the assumption that Iran has only P-1 centrifuges, that it is five to 10 years away from making a nuclear weapon. A report released over the weekend by a U.S.-based nuclear watchdog group said commercial satellite photos indicate Iran has begun to expand its nuclear fuel plants and has buried one beneath dozens of feet of earth and concrete. (Full story) Analysts for the Institute for Science and International Security spotted what they said were new tunnel entrances at the Isfahan uranium conversion plant and the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Iran says it does not want to produce a nuclear bomb, but has a right to pursue nuclear energy under the 1968 Non-proliferation Treaty. The U.N. Security Council has called on Iran to halt uranium enrichment work, and the diplomatic confrontation has led to media reports that the United States and Israel have drawn up plans to bomb Iran's nuclear research plants -- reports U.S. President George W. Bush dismissed as "wild speculation" last week. (Full story) Ahmadinejad announced last week that his country had produced a small amount of enriched uranium at Natanz in concentrations capable of running a nuclear power plant -- a level far below that needed for a nuclear weapon. The pilot program at Natanz used a cascade of 164 centrifuges, Iranian officials said. Tens of thousands of centrifuges are needed to produce enough enriched uranium to produce fuel for a reactor or for nuclear weapons. 
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