Nuclear Sites
Pars Trash (Tarash)
Pars Trash (Tarash)
Pars Trash, a subsidiary of Kalaye Electric located in Tehran, is another centrifuge site that received equipment from Kalaye Electric in particular for Iran’s P-2/IR-2 centrifuge development effort.
Pars Trash, a small company employing about ten people, is located in Tehran among warehouses and light industrial buildings about a kilometer west of the Kalaye Electric facility. It manufactured the centrifuge’s outer casings. These are the thick aluminum tubes that house the centrifuge rotor assembly and, in the case of an accident, prevent broken pieces of the thin-walled rotor assembly, which can act like shrapnel, from injuring or even killing bystanders. Pars Trash was originally a small private factory involved in making automobile parts. It went bankrupt and was bought by the Kalaye Electric Company, or its subsidiary Farayand, for the three expensive computer-operated machine tools it owned, which could be adapted to the manufacture of centrifuge components.
An engineer married to the plant manager is believed to have been the backbone of the operation. She programmed and set up the machines to make centrifuge components and ensured their quality, before turning the operation over to a technician who subsequently operated the automated machines to produce thousands of components.
The current status of operations at Pars is unknown as IAEA inspectors had access to the site only while Iran was adhering voluntarily to the Additional Protocol.