The US has dismissed claims from Tehran that Iran is capable of enriching uranium to twenty per cent.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad boasted Iran is now a nuclear nation as he marked the 1979 Islamic revolution, prompting the West to warn his regime would soon be slapped with new sanctions.
He says the first stock of 20 per cent fuel has been produced and delivered to scientists.
Iran had previously enriched uranium to just 3.5 per cent but has started enriching it to the higher level required for a Tehran medical research reactor, after snubbing a UN-drafted plan for the nuclear fuel to be supplied by France and Russia.
But the White House has cast doubt on the Iranian claims, saying some of Tehran's statements are based on politics, and not science.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says the US doesn't believe they've the capacity to enrich to the degree to which they say they're now doing.
The US Treasury Department has already imposed an asset freeze on an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, and four subsidiaries of a construction firm owned or controlled by the elite force.
Two days after President Barack Obama said he was seeking a "significant" new array of international sanctions over Iran's nuclear program, his spokesman Robert Gibbs hit out at Iran's claims of accelerating uranium enrichment.
"The Iranian nuclear program has undergone a series of problems throughout the year," he said, arguing that much of what President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said turned out not to be true.
"We do not believe they have the capability to enrich to the degree to which they now say they are enriching," Gibbs said.
Ahmadinejad announced earlier Iran had produced a "first stock" of 20 per cent enriched uranium for its nuclear program and was capable of enriching it to 80 per cent but would not do so.
Anniversary nuclear claims matched with fresh protests
The latest nuclear confrontation with Iran is escalating as the Islamic republic's government confronts fresh protests in the streets of Tehran, and Washington made a fresh warning for violence to be avoided.
Gibbs recalled comments by the president in his Nobel Peace Prize address last year, saying the White House stood "by the universal rights of Iranians to express themselves freely and to do so without intimidation or violence."
The State Department meanwhile said authorities in Tehran had attempted an unprecedented "near total information blockade" in a bid to quash the demonstrations.
Spokesman Philip Crowley based his statement on US monitoring that showed the telephone network had been taken down, text messages blocked and the internet throttled.
He called it an "unprecedented, overwhelming step" by Tehran to act against its own citizens. "It's a remarkable statement... of how significantly the Iranian government fears its own people," Crowley said.
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