IAEA opens 70th conference with no Iran inspections for six months

The International Atomic Energy Agency opened its 70th General Conference in Vienna on 14 September with a blunt inventory of what inspectors can no longer see. Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi told member states that, aside from one visit to the Bushehr power plant in June, the Agency has conducted no in-field verification in Iran for more than six months. Continuity of knowledge on previously declared inventories of low-enriched uranium and of uranium enriched up to 60 percent U-235 has been broken for more than a year, he said, at facilities hit in the military attacks of June 2025.

That gap, not the ceremonial calendar, set the tone for the five-day meeting at the Vienna International Centre. Grossi called the missing information a matter of serious proliferation concern that needs to be fixed with urgency. He also welcomed Timor-Leste as the Agency's 182nd member state, a reminder that the conference is still doing ordinary institutional business while the Iran file dominates the floor.

Austria, under pressure from the United States according to Iranian officials, blocked Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, from addressing the gathering. Behrouz Kamalvandi, the organisation's spokesperson, was listed to speak instead. Iran had asked the Secretariat to put on the agenda a ban on attacks and threats of attack against nuclear sites under Agency safeguards and devoted to peaceful use. The request sits beside a communication from Israel seeking an item on Israeli Nuclear Capabilities and a United States request on the transfer of nuclear materials under AUKUS.

Grossi's prepared statement sketched the sequence. Renewed attacks on Iran at the end of February forced the withdrawal of inspectors. After the June visit to Bushehr, the Agency has had no other on-site work. He said it is well over a year since inspectors lost continuity of knowledge on the previously declared stocks at the sites affected by the June 2025 strikes. A return to diplomacy, he added, is imperative, and the Agency is ready to support it.

The Board of Governors had already moved before the conference opened. On 9 September it reported Iran to the United Nations Security Council for the first time in 20 years, citing failure to cooperate in a long-running investigation into uranium traces at undeclared sites. Twenty-three of the 35 Board members voted for the resolution tabled by the United States, Britain, France and Germany. China, Russia and Niger voted against. Eight members abstained. One did not vote because it was in arrears.

A June 2025 Board resolution had already found Iran in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement after more than six years of unanswered questions. A follow-up resolution in June 2026 urged Tehran to restore access. Three months later, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States told the Board that the Agency had received no information from Iran on the status of any declared facilities or material during the reporting period, and that inspectors had had no access to declared sites since June.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright delivered the American national statement on opening day. He said Iran's failure to meet NPT-required safeguards undermines the international nonproliferation regime and that that time is up. The United States position, he said, is that Iran must never obtain a nuclear weapon and must give the Agency the access it needs. Iranian officials used the same podium week to argue that the Agency has not condemned attacks on safeguarded sites and that inspectors were pulled after those attacks, not because Tehran closed the door on its own.

The conference papers list the rest of the week's work: the 2025 annual report, the 2027 budget scale of assessment, the Nuclear Security Report 2026, safeguards effectiveness, technical cooperation pledges, and separate files on Ukraine, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and the Middle East. Sessions in the Plenary Hall are being livestreamed. Board members will be elected before the meeting closes on 18 September.

Grossi also used the opening day to release the Agency's 46th annual energy outlook. In the high case, global nuclear generating capacity reaches 1,045 gigawatts electric by 2050 and 1,284 GW(e) by 2060, about 3.4 times the 2025 level. The low case still nearly doubles capacity, to 696 GW(e). It is the sixth straight year the Agency has raised its projections. Small modular reactors are written into the growth path. The contrast with the Iran file is sharp: the same week the Agency talks about a tripling of civilian nuclear plant, it cannot count the material already produced in one member state.

One quieter line in Grossi's speech will matter for the Syria file. After receiving access and information from Damascus, the Agency said it has clarified and resolved outstanding safeguards questions on Syria's past nuclear activities. That close-out sits next to the Iran gap on the same agenda.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in a message delivered by Monica Juma of the U.N. Office at Vienna, said the conference meets in a period of profound global turbulence, with attacks on nuclear facilities rising and the drivers of proliferation accelerating while the guardrails against it weaken. That language tracks Grossi's own warning. The Agency can account for what it can visit. For Iran's declared inventory of material enriched up to 60 percent, and for the plants that held it, the visit list has been almost empty since mid-2025.

What the conference cannot do in five days is restore that knowledge. It can record the gap, seat a new member, and vote on next year's budget. The next test sits outside the hall: whether Iran and the Agency reopen a verification channel before the Security Council takes up the Board's referral, and whether any return of inspectors covers the sites and the material that dropped off the books after the 2025 strikes.