Agence France-Presse,
Tehran: Iran has enriched and stored more than 100 kilogrammes (220 pounds) of enriched uranium, its interior minister said in remarks published on Friday on the eve of top-level talks over its controversial nuclear programme. “We have currently 3,000 operational centrifuges and delivered more than 100 kilogrammes of enriched uranium to warehouses,” said Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, quoted by the ISNA news agency.
He added that Iran had also stocked more than “150 tonnes of uranium gas.”
Iran has come under intense US-led pressure and UN sanctions over its nuclear programme which it insists is for peaceful purposes and to which it has a right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The West suspects Tehran's work is aimed a producing nuclear weapons.
Later on Friday, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, is due in Vienna to meet Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
That meeting will be followed on Saturday by talks in Portugal between Larijani and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana
Iran has been slapped with two sets of UN Security Council sanctions and it is likely to face a third for its refusal to suspend sensitive enrichment work, the process which makes nuclear fuel but can also, in highly-enriched form, provide the fissile core of an atom bomb.
