“„Until Iran submits design information to the IAEA, the Administration’s statement cannot be verified. The good news here is that Iran has announced the facility (although it is unclear if it decided to do so because the cat was already out of the bag) and has said that it would comply fully with the IAEA. Unfortunately, as cool as ISIS’ satellite photos are, they only show tunnel entrances in a mountain (there are many of those around that area, if you play around on Google Earth). Moreover, the locations are just guesses based on information that has been disseminated by the media. We cannot tell much about the number and type of centrifuges that will be installed at Qom from the ISIS satellite imagery.
“„How could the administration know that Iran is installing 3,000 machines? One way would be to compare the area of the Qom facility to that of the enrichment plant at Natanz. Centrifuges do not take up a lot of space and if you knew the average area per cascade, you could approximate how many machines can fit in a given space. You can come up with an estimate for the size of the facility based on the amount of rock that the Iranians are throwing out (if they are digging a hole in a mountain, they have to dispose of the material somewhere). You can tell something about the size also if you knew how much explosive they used to blast the hole. There is no way to know that a particular tunnel will be used to house centrifuges until you have more information provided by other sources. You can also consider the power lines that are going inside the facility. Still, the conclusion is that we cannot independently verify this information.