Tehran, YJC. Salehi says Iran has played highly flexible in negotiations with the P5+1, going out of its way to help build trust.
Iran’s Head of Nuclear Energy Organization in an interview
on state TV on Tuesday evening said "We have these step-by-step suggestions on
enrichment. We say that we want 190 thousand SWUs, and procuring that need
depends on the type of machines we use. We will use and gas the same machines
that have already been installed. Once we are able to remove the shortcomings
in the new machines and mass-produce them, a year or two prior to the 8th
year, we will install the new machines so that we may reach 190 thousand SWUs.”
"The same way we showed flexibility on Arak heavy water, we
will prove flexible in enrichment as well, following things in a step-by-step
fashion. We will set these few years for trust-building, producing only as much
as we need,” Ali Akbar Salehi asserted.
Pointing out that Western negotiators have pushed to shut
down the Fordo facilities he said "This suggestion is ridiculous. There are
many suggestions for the future Fordo where it would be both a research and
development center and able to produce stable isotopes, something which was
also offered by Russians; and this by the way is something that needs
centrifuges. Right now there are many suggestions regarding Fordo, but what the
Supreme Leader said must be adopted as pivotal; thereby necessitating the use
of the facilities as a center for research and development, besides other
activities that can be done in Fordo. It is a vast area. They also suggested
that physical tests could be performed there.”
Providing comments on nuclear ‘breakout’ as used by Western
negotiators he stated "The nuclear breakout is a newfangled phrase they brought
up as an alibi. They used it for example for the heavy water, but I had
announced a few months earlier that if the heavy water concerns them, we could
re-design it, reducing the plutonium amount from 10 kg a year to 1. After the
offer met strange initial welcomes, they invented a new terminology as ‘misuse’,
saying ‘It is true that you re-process, but you may misuse it.’ They use
whatever terminology they can.”
"We said we were willing to reprocess the Arak reactor while
the heavy water aspect about it remains the same. We said we were willing to keep
the current centrifuge machines for some years, increasing them in number only
after 8 years. These are some big instances of flexibility. We agreed to hear
the IAEA on around 15 topics and to answer their questions,” Salehi maintained.