Iran announced a series of advances in nuclear technology on Wednesday, heightening fears that it may be accelerating efforts to develop atomic bombs as an offshoot to its civilian power program.

In a ceremony broadcast live on Iranian state television on Wednesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated three new nuclear projects.

"This is another huge step in Iran's nuclear technology and this path should be decisively continued," Ahmadinejad said in a ceremony at the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization in Tehran.

"The era of bullying nations has passed," he said, dismissing Western concerns that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons. "The arrogant powers cannot monopolize nuclear technology. They tried to prevent us by issuing sanctions and resolutions but failed."

Ahmadinejad was present to witness the insertion of the country's first domestically made nuclear fuel rods into a reactor producing medical isotopes.

The other developments include a new generation of more reliable centrifuges, less prone to breakdowns, which could dramatically speed up the country's uranium enrichment activities.

"Today we witnessed the activation of the first cascade of these centrifuges," the head of the Atomic Energy Organization, Fereydoon Abbasi Davani, announced in a speech on state television. "They increase Iran's capacity to enrich uranium by three times," he said.

The Natanz nuclear plant in central Iran, where the centrifuges are being installed, will also be able to enrich uranium to 20 percent.

More rapid stockpiling

The development would shorten the time needed to stockpile enriched uranium, which can - if refined sufficiently - be used to produce nuclear weapons.

Coinciding with the announcement, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov voiced Moscow's concerns about Iranian progress towards developing nuclear weapons.

"We are concerned that the distance that separates Iran from the hypothetical possession of technologies to create nuclear weapons is contracting," Ryabkov told the journal Security Index, adding that the western approach of sanctions was not working.

Moscowinsists the Iranian nuclear be resolved through diplomacy and has issued strong warnings against military action, which has not been ruled out by the United States and Israel.

On Wednesday, the EU confirmed it had received and was "carefully studying" an Iranian response to proposals to resume negotiations on the nuclear issue.

rc/ncy (AP, AFP, dpa, Reuters)