A friend e-mails:

Rich — This story and others we’ve seen on the “agreement in principle” raise some troubling questions.
First. does Iran get to keep enriching uranium in the meantime? In other words, are we backing off the demands of three Security Council resolutions? To my knowledge Iran has not stopped enriching uranium for an hour this whole time, and has no plans to. At current capacity, it can accumulate another 1200kg in a matter of months.
Second, we need to ask if that LEU the French are going to return to Iran as feedstock for a the Tehran Research Reactor — whether Iran can burn it at TRR and then wind up with a bunch of burnt fuel rods containing weapons-grade plutonium? The fact that the TRR is for “medical isotopes” says to me that it’s a hard-water reactor, the kind used to produce weapons-grade plutonium in North Korea and Pakistan. Those reactors burn natural uranium, not necessarily enriched uranium, but regardless this sounds suspiciously like a step in the direction of weapons-grade plutonium unless I’m missing something. The answer may be simple, but we need clarity on this point.
Third, regardless of the other two issues, the reason the IAEA has never been able to certify that Iran is in compliance with its safeguards agreements (since 2003) is because of questions surrounding possible undeclared facilities and activities. In light of the IAEA’s open issues on Iran, which include for example – unanswered demands for records of the production of centrifuges –nothing I’ve seen in the published statements would get Iran into compliance as far as the IAEA is concerned. Maybe that’s in the non-public part of the agreement.
This last question, incidentally, is where your Daily Beast writer has it wrong. What the transfer of 1200kg of LEU out of the country would mean is that Iran no longer has enough declared LEU to make a bomb. But given the possible existence of other Qom-type facilities, Iran could well have enough undeclared LEU to make a bomb even with this agreement, so I still want to know where the “transparency” Obama demanded is going to come on that issue. In other words, we still need to get towards anytime/anywhere inspections for at least some period of time, so that we can exclude the possibility of undeclared enrichment facilities.