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VIENNA: The UN atomic agency on Thursday shelved indefinitely Iran's request for technical help in building a nuclear reactor that the United States fears could provide plutonium for weapons.
“The decision right now is that the project (safety expertise for Iran's Arak reactor) will definitely be put on hold . . . so that project today will not be implemented by the agency,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters.
“I think the decision by the (IAEA) board of governors is very much linked to (lack of) confidence in the peaceful nature of Iran's (nuclear) program” and that things could change “if that confidence was to be restored,” ElBaradei said.
The IAEA's board's decision came after three days of divisive meetings in Vienna on technical cooperation that ended with a compromise between Western and developing states.
ElBaradei said limited cooperation by Iran had blocked the agency from making “further progress” on clearing up questions about Tehran's nuclear program, which Washington suspects of hiding weapons development.
But ElBaradei told the board, in reporting on the program, that Tehran had recently made “steps in the right direction.”
It has agreed to let IAEA inspectors take environmental sample swipes on equipment from a former military site at Lavizan and to grant access to operating records at a uranium enrichment plant in Natanz.
The IAEA had requested these steps for months, as Iran pushed ahead with uranium enrichment in defiance of a UN call for it to suspend the sensitive nuclear work which makes nuclear reactor fuel but also atom bomb material, or face sanctions.
The IAEA has other outstanding issues it wishes to clear up but Iranian ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh made clear that there would be no more such steps unless the UN Security Council stops threatening Iran with sanctions.
Soltanieh even warned that the Iranian parliament could cut the country's cooperation with IAEA inspectors if the Council goes ahead with sanctions, according to a copy of his speech to the board.
ElBaradei reacted with a passionate closing speech in which he called on Iran to do more, cooperating fully and not hiding behind legalities, diplomats said.
“The main message is that it is definitely up to Iran,” one diplomat said of ElBaradei's comments.
ElBaradei told AFP that Iran needs to give the IAEA “a full explanation of the development of its nuclear program from start to finish” and “to openly corroborate this explanation with evidence, including records and access to relevant locations and individuals involved.”
The agency's governing board blocked technical cooperation for the heavy-water reactor Iran is building in Arak, 200 kilometres (120 miles) south of Tehran, by dropping the proposal from a list of some 800 aid projects it approved on Thursday for the coming two years, an IAEA spokeswoman said.
US ambassador Gregory Schulte insisted that the deletion of the Iranian request was permanent.
“The Arak project was not deferred . . . It was removed entirely from the IAEA program,” Schulte told reporters, though his view was at odds with that of developing nations' interpretation of Thursday's compromise.
In a face-saving compromise, the Arak project was officially shelved rather than rejected, with the board's chairman saying “no decision is taken” on the Iranian request, which remained listed in an annex.
An Iranian diplomat described the IAEA move as “only a postponement.”
Soltanieh said Iran would continue to build Arak since “hospitals desperately need the radioisotopes” the reactor is designed to make. In fact, construction would be speeded up “in order to fulfill the humanitarian demand.”
But both the IAEA and the Security Council have called on Iran to “reconsider” building Arak due to concerns of it being misused.
The United States and the European Union did however accept the IAEA approving seven other aid projects for Iran which were not considered proliferation risks.
Schulte said the United States “strongly supports” peaceful nuclear technology “but neither we nor the board are prepared to help countries build nuclear bombs.”
