More Mystery Iran Disasters - Major Fire At Isfahan Refinery, Huge Blast At Revolutionary Guards Base

Iran is finally reporting on a major fire and explosion that took place yesterday at its Isfahan refinery, the second largest in the country.

According to the official account,a malfunction at the refinery caused a leakage of cooling water from its generators, causing a power outage and blackout.One pereson was reported killed.

The official story is that there was no explosion, and that fires were caused by workers burning off excess oil and gas in pipelines to prevent one from happening. However, Iranian dissidents reported a loud explosion at the refinery, and the fact that one person was killed would seem to support that.Various eye-witnesses reported seeing flames and thick smoke covering the area.

There was a major power outage as a result according to the Iranian Mehr news agency.

One of the Iranian regime's weak points is its refinery capacity. Major damage to a refinery like the one at Isfahan is going to have an impact not only in terms of capacity but in terms of the amount of refined fuel the regime is going to have to import, for which it has to pay in hard currency.

This isn't going to do the rial any good..it's dropped from an official rate of $1,300 hundred to the dollar to $1,500 to the dollar in a matter of weeks, and refined fuels trades are conducted in dollars.

Another reliable source of mine reported a major explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base in Kerman,the headquarters for the Guard’s operations in the East, near the Afghan border. No details yet,but I'm told it was quite a large blast.Probably just a coincidence, no?

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Another Mysterious Explosion In Iran

This one targeted a steel plant in in the city of Yazd, located southeast of Tehran and east of Isfahan.

The Iranian's story was originally that some water had penetrated into the steel's melting pot but they later switched that to say that some ammunition brought to the factory had exploded. What ammunition would be doing at a steel plant is anybody's guess.

Another point of interest is that the Iranians admitted that out of the seven people killed, several were foreigners. Again, what foreigners would be doing at a steel plant is anyone's guess, especially during what are normally the plant's off hours...unless you look at another piece of the puzzle. Steel figures heavily in two Iranian projects related to their rogue nuclear program.

The Iranians plan to install new high-speed centrifuges of the IR2 and IR3 type at the new Fordu uranium enrichment site buried deep in the mountainside near the city of Qom. But building those centrifuges takes large quantities of a special steel, known as maraging steel, designed to take high heat and friction generated by the speed the centrifuges spin at.

The Iranians lack the expertise and technology to make it, so they've been buying it from North Korea (with Russia's connivance, of course). The German paper Die Welt newspaper recently reported that North Korea had sold both Iran and Syria a quantity of maraging steel fairly recently.

The steel is not only required for modern centrifuges but for the construction of exhaust systems for the engines used in ballistic missiles,the other project the Iranians are interested in.

That could account for both the mysterious explosion and the death of some foreign technicians if, say, somebody wanted to delay the Iranians building those centrifuges and missile engines by ensuring that there was an 'accident' at the steel plant.

Although of course, this could all be a coincidence.Maybe someone was just a little careless.

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