The outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told the UN Security Council today that his agency’s infrastructure was “dilapidated” and lacked state of the art technology to ensure nuclear verification and security.

Director-general Mohamed ElBaradei, whose term of office ends in November 2009, told the meeting in New York that the global nuclear non-proliferation regime was fragile and had many shortcomings.

He said that at the current level of funding, the IAEA would not be able to fulfil its mission in nuclear verification and security.

And Mr ElBaradei reiterated earlier calls for multinational control of the nuclear fuel cycle. He said there were a growing number of states that had mastered uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing and that any of them could develop nuclear weapons in a short time if, for example, they decided to withdraw from the international non-proliferation treaty (NPT).

“To address this, I believe that we need to move from national to multinational control of the nuclear fuel cycle. As a first step, I have proposed the establishment of a low enriched uranium bank to assure states a guaranteed supply of nuclear fuel for their reactors so that they might not need their own enrichment or reprocessing capability.”

However, Mr ElBaradei said the IAEA’s legal authority was severely limited in some countries because many states had not concluded the required agreements with the agency. “As a result, in over 90 states, the agency either has no verification authority at all, or its authority is inadequate. That means we often cannot verify whether a country is engaged in clandestine nuclear activities,” he added.

He called on the Security Council to develop a “comprehensive compliance mechanism to address, in a consistent and systematic manner, cases of non-compliance with safeguards obligations or of countries withdrawing from the NPT”. Mr ElBaradei said this should include giving the IAEA the additional authority it may need to deal with specific cases.

Mr ElBaradei has served as director-general since 1997. He had said that he was not available for a fourth term of office and will be succeeded by Yukiya Amano of Japan.