Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tehran is willing to send its uranium abroad to be further enriched, as Western powers moved yesterday toward tougher sanctions against Tehran over its nuclear defiance.
Iran would have “no problem,” Ahmadinejad said in a television interview late on Tuesday, sending out it stocks of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to be further purified into reactor fuel.
DEADLINE
His statement came after the expiry on Jan. 31 of a deadline set by Tehran for world powers to respond to its counter proposal on a UN-brokered plan concerning Iran’s nuclear program.
“There is really no problem. Some made a fuss for nothing. There is no problem. We sign a contract. We give them [world powers] 3.5 percent [enriched uranium] and it will take four or five months for them to give us the 20 percent [enriched uranium],” he said in an interview broadcast live on state television.
Iran needs nuclear fuel to power its UN-monitored reactor in Tehran, but the West fears the program is masking efforts to produce atomic weapons — claims vehemently denied by the Islamic republic.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has proposed, in a bid to allay Western fears about Iran’s atomic ambitions, that Tehran ship out its LEU to Russia and France to be further purified into reactor fuel.
ABOUT-FACE
Iran, which agreed in principle to the offer during talks with world powers in Geneva in October, later appeared to reject the deal.
Ahmadinejad’s latest remarks reiterate his original support of the IAEA-brokered deal.
However his time-frame of four or five months for the process appears to fall short of the period of about a year experts say is needed for 3.5 percent LEU to be enriched to 20 percent.
THREATS
Over the past few months, he has also threatened to defy world powers and warned that Iran would press on with its own enrichment program if they continued threatening further sanctions.
Iranian Foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki said last week that “new ideas” were being discussed regarding the nuclear deal but did not elaborate.
Ahmadinejad, speaking casually in Tuesday’s interview, which mainly focused on Iran’s economic issues, did not say how much LEU Iran would be ready to ship out.
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