TEHRAN: Iran said on Wednesday it would not send its enriched uranium abroad for further processing but would consider swapping it for nuclear fuel and keeping it under supervision inside the country, the ISNA news agency said.
The decision is expected to anger the United States and its allies, which had called on Iran to accept a deal which aimed to delay Iran’s potential ability to make bombs by at least a year by divesting Iran of most of its enriched uranium.
A draft deal brokered by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, calls on Iran to send some 75 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France to be turned into fuel for a Tehran medical research reactor.
“Surely we will not send our 3.5 percent fuel abroad but can review swapping it simultaneously with nuclear fuel inside Iran,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the ISNA students’ news agency.
The United States has rejected Iranian calls for amendments and further talks on the deal and US President Barack Obama said time was running out for diplomacy to resolve a long standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.
Mottaki criticized the United States for pressuring Iran to accept the deal. “Diplomacy is not black or white. Pressuring Iran to accept what they want is a nondiplomatic approach.”
Russia and France, both also involved in the fuel proposal, also pressed Iran to accept it as is. Tehran faces possible harsher international sanctions and risks even last-ditch Israeli military action to knock out its nuclear sites. Iran says it needs nuclear technology to generate power but its history of nuclear secrecy and restricting UN inspections have raised Western suspicions of a covert quest for atom bombs. Tehran has repeatedly said it preferred to buy reactor fuel from foreign suppliers rather than part with its low enriched uranium (LEU) — also bomb material if refined to high purity.
