Nuclear Energy

On Christmas eve in 1938, the physicist Lise Meitner took a walk in the snowy woods of Kungalv, Sweden, with her nephew, Otto Frisch, also a physicist. A Jewish refugee who had recently escaped from Hitler's Germany, Meitner began discussing with Frisch some puzzling experimental results from a lab in Berlin.

Two inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived in Iran to inspect the country's nuclear facilities, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. Iran's parliament urged the government in late December to reexamine its ties with the United Nations' nuclear watchdog after the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions against Tehran over its disputed nuclear program.

Iran will not suspend its uranium enrichment work as demanded by a United Nations resolution, the country's top nuclear official said Sunday as a deadline loomed. On Dec. 23, the Security Council imposed limited sanctions on Iran after it refused to suspend its atomic program, which Western powers worry will be used to produce nuclear weapons. It gave Iran 60 days to halt enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors, which Tehran says is its aim, or material for warheads.

It is a few weeks before the Iranian new year, and already the narrow market streets in south Tehran are boiling with extra shoppers. Houses must be cleaned, new curtains hung on the windows, the table laid with fresh linens. No child should leave home without new clothes and a few crisp bills in his pocket.

Tens of thousands of flag-waving Iranians converged on Azadi Square on Sunday to voice support for Iran's bid for nuclear energy, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed to press forward with the nation's uranium enrichment program. "When we suspend our activities, they will never let us resume them," the president told a crowd of cheering, chanting supporters who alternately sang patriotic anthems and burned Uncle Sam-hatted effigies of President Bush.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said that Moscow would consider helping Saudi Arabia with a possible atomic energy program and that he hoped to build stronger ties with Muslim countries. "Russia is willing to look into cooperation opportunities in the area of atomic energy," Putin told Saudi businessmen in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

Iran's top leader said Saturday that the country's oil and gas reserves eventually will dry up and defended the drive to produce nuclear fuel, asserting that it was the only way to avoid dependence on the West for energy. "Oil and gas reserves won't last forever. If a nation doesn't think of producing its future energy needs, it will be dependent on domination-seeking powers," state television quoted supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as saying.

The renewed push for legislation to cut greenhouse gas emissions could falter over an old debate: whether nuclear power should play a role in any federal attack on climate change. Congress, with added impetus from a Supreme Court ruling last week, appears more likely to pass comprehensive energy legislation. But nuclear power sharply divides lawmakers who agree on mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions.

The Bush administration's plan to rapidly expand global nuclear energy took a key step Wednesday when the government signed an agreement with Japan to conduct joint research on a new generation of reactors and a new type of nuclear fuel. The Energy Department has been pushing an ambitious but controversial agenda to build a fleet of nuclear power plants worldwide, based on prospective technology that would include reprocessing radioactive wastes.

As Iran races ahead with an illicit uranium enrichment effort, nearly a dozen other Middle East nations are moving forward on their own civilian nuclear programs. In the latest development, a team of eight U.N. experts on Friday ended a weeklong trip to Saudi Arabia to provide nuclear guidance to officials from six Persian Gulf countries.