Part of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran's (AEOI) Metallurgical Engineering and Fuel Department; located at the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center (ENTC); Iran commissioned a foreign supplier to construct the lab in 1984; first disclosed to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1993; formally declared to the IAEA in 1998; site visited by the IAEA between April 24, and May 5, 2004; still in operation; houses presses, sintering furnaces, milling machines, grinding machines and helium leak detectors; between 1985 and 1993, experiments conducted to manufacture sintered pellets using 50kg of depleted UO2 imported in 1977 and exempted from safeguards until 1998; Iran declared 13.1kg of this material as a process loss in 1997; in October 2003, Iran admitted that between 1988 and 1992 it irradiated 7kg of the exempted uranium in the form of pressed or sintered depleted UO2 pellets in the Tehran Research Reactor and then conducted experiments at the Tehran Nuclear Research Center in plutonium separation experiments with hot cells.