Sunday, February 23, 2003
Iran agrees to provide early information on new nuclear facilities
Associated Press Tehran, February 23
Iran has agreed to provide early information about any proposed nuclear facility's design, the top UN nuclear inspector said on Saturday.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran will also consider allowing his agency to inspect undeclared nuclear facilities without prior announcement. "The Iranian government has agreed to provide us as of now with early design information on any of its (nuclear) facilities," he told a news conference in Tehran, Iran's capital. "It is a sign of greater transparency from Iran regarding its nuclear programs," he said at the end of a two-day visit to Iran.
ElBaradei's visit to Iran included a tour of an incomplete Iranian nuclear plant in Natanz. He also met with Iranian President Mohamad Khatami before leaving Tehran one day ahead of his scheduled departure. He had been scheduled to visit a nuclear facility in Isfahan in central Iran.
In Vienna, IAEA spokeswomen Melissa Fleming said ElBaradei's early departure had no political significance.
"Mr. ElBaradei decided to leave a day earlier because he was able to accomplish the visits and the meeting he had set out to do in two days," Fleming told The Associated Press. She said he left two senior members of his team behind in Iran for several days.
"They will be visiting a number of sites, including Arak," she added, referring to a nuclear power plant under construction in central Iran. ElBaradei was visiting Iran's nuclear facilities to ensure the country's nuclear industry was limited to peaceful, civilian purposes and to check the safety of generating plants. Iran maintains it will use its nuclear power for energy production only, but the United States claims the facilities are part of a secret nuclear weapons program.
In December, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said satellite imagery showed some structures at the Natanz plant were being covered with earth, indicating Iran is building "a secret underground site where it could produce fissile material." "That facility was probably never intended by Iran to be a declared component of the peaceful (nuclear) programme," Boucher said at the time.
But Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's envoy to the U.N. agency, said Friday that the walled compound is built partially underground for safety reasons.
During his Saturday's news conference, ElBaradei said the Natanz nuclear plant was a "very sophisticated" centrifuge facility for uranium enrichment. Meanwhile, Khatami reiterated that his country was following international regulations and that its facilities are open to U.N. inspections.
"Iran is fully committed to the international conventions concerning civilian application of nuclear energy," he was quoted by the official Islamic Republic News Agency as saying during his meeting with ElBaradei. Earlier this month, Iran said it has started mining uranium for the first time and will soon open a facility to process the ore into fuel, vowing to move ahead with a nuclear program it says is solely for electrical production.
The president said earlier this month that Iran was setting up production facilities "to make use of advanced nuclear technology for peaceful purposes."
The mining project would give Iran - which Washington has labeled part of the "axis of evil" - independent access to fissile material.
Iran is relying on Russia for nuclear fuel for its first power plant, to be completed later this year at the southern port of Bushehr.
The United States has tried to dissuade Russia from assisting the project for a 1,000-megawatt reactor.
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