Tehran, Feb 3 (DPA) Iran is ready to complete a uranium exchange deal with world nuclear powers, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday.
Ahmadinejad said in an interview with state television that, after renewed talks with world powers, Iran was ready to exchange its low-enriched uranium for a more highly processed version to be used as fuel in the Tehran nuclear reactor.
He said a contract would be signed to guarantee that the deal would be properly and fully implemented.
Ahmadinejad said that there have been some new developments after positive talks held recently with some of the countries involved in the negotiations.
He did not name the countries but observers believe those would have been Russia and China. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki also met last week in Davos with an unnamed adviser of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The Iranian president said that there were also agreements on exchanging the uranium on Iranian soil, but that Iran could also send its low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad for further processing.
“We have no opposition to sending our LEU abroad, as we want to have constructive cooperation and as we can at any time produce the LEU again inside Iran,” Ahmadinejad said.
“There will be a contract for calming down the concerns at home and for guaranteeing that the deal will be properly and fully implemented,” he added.
The president said, for technical reasons, Iran could not exchange the uranium in three different phases.
According to a plan brokered in October by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran’s LEU was to be exported to Russia for further enrichment, and then to France for processing into fuel for a Tehran reactor.
At the time, Tehran said it was prepared either to buy the more highly enriched uranium outright, or exchange its own for more highly enriched uranium if the swap took place on Iranian soil.
The alternative would be for Iran to process its own uranium, he said. This is the scenario that the international community is seeking to avoid.
The world powers and the IAEA had also refused to have the handover take place in Iran.
Iran insists it has the right to pursue peaceful nuclear development as a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and an IAEA member and rejects Western charges that it has been working on a secret programme to make an atomic bomb.
However, its lack of transparency regarding its nuclear programme and refusal to suspend uranium enrichment have led to several UN Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions against the Islamic state.
In a related development, Ahmadinejad said that Tehran was not worried about the United States’ deployment of a new missile shield against Iran in four Persian Gulf countries.
“We are not worried as no country in the world would dare to harm Iran,” Ahmadinejad said in an interview with state television.
The New York Times reported Saturday that the US was speeding up its deployment of a new missile shield against Iran in four nations of the region – Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait.
“Iran is the number one power in the region and because of that number one power in the world,” the president said.
“Therefore we have no worries as we know that the final aim of the Americans is to take the oil money out of the pocket of the regional sheikhdoms,” he added.
He however warned that in case of any aggression against Iran, there would be a “reply which would make the other side regret its actions and turn Iran into a graveyard.”
The president however doubted that the US and its allies would dare such a move and said that they rather needed Iran’s assistance to solve their problems in the region.
