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340473
Mon, 09/08/2014 - 13:20
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Iran Daily Criticizes Unfair Part Of IAEA Report

Tehran, Sept 8, IRNA - IAEA inspectors have conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities, but have invariably failed to find any evidence of diversion in the Iranian nuclear energy program to military objectives, wrote ˈIran Dailyˈ in its Monday edition. In this light, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should welcome the positive measures taken by Iran and move toward closing the decade-long case, stressed the English-language daily in its Opinion column. The daily was commenting on the latest report on Iran’s nuclear program in which the IAEA confirmed that Tehran responded to 16 key questions of the UN body. IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said in the report that Iran has implemented three of five transparency steps that it was supposed to take by August 25 in line with a roadmap agreed with the UN nuclear body last November. The IAEA, however, added that Iran has been slow in providing the agency with information about its past nuclear activities, including alleged experiments on explosives that could be used for military purposes. Iran had also told the IAEA that most suspicions about the nature of its program were “mere allegations and do not merit consideration”. Stressing on the part that Iran did not implement two of five transparency steps is unfair because in its report, the IAEA confirmed that Iran responded to 16 questions that the UN nuclear agency was seeking for several years, pointed out the paper. On other hand, it had been predicted that Iran was unable to take all of these five transparency steps during a three-month period, it noted. Reacting to the report, Iranian Ambassador to the IAEA Reza Najafi said that Iran “had previously notified the agency that, considering the complexity of the issues in question, the full implementation of the five measures was not possible by August 25. Therefore, the agency has not expressed concern over the issue in its report, as it was aware of that beforehand.” So far, Iran has not announced it will not implement the two measures, but asked the agency to give it more time to address IAEA’s concerns, it said. Therefore highlighting the remaining two transparency measures and trying to label the report as a negative one is unreasonable, the paper criticized. In contrast to the past government, the Rouhani administration is seeking to boost cooperation with IAEA and resolve the ambiguities surrounding Tehran’s nuclear program, highlighted the daily. Based on the new approach of the government, the UN nuclear agency visited the Saqand and Gachin mines and is carrying out monthly and daily inspections of nuclear facilities as well as factories producing nuclear centrifuges. All these are positive measures taken by Tehran in recent months, it pointed out. In this report, IAEA also said that Iran cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium to about 7.8 tons in August from 8.5 tons in May, confirming that it has stopped the enrichment of UF6 above the five-percent level, and no longer has any stockpile of UF6 enriched up to 20-percent. IAEA said that no new facilities have been installed at Arak Heavy Water reactor, and there has been no fuel test or production process at the site. The report noted that Iran continues to provide the agency with controlled access to centrifuge assembly units and stockpile facilities. As you see, all of these parts show that Tehran is continuing cooperation with the nuclear agency and trying to fulfill its obligations. Therefore the IAEA should take the opportunity for collaboration with Tehran and not allow unnecessary technical and legal issues to divert the process of mutual cooperation. One of the disputes between Iran-IAEA is the agency’s demand to access Parchin military site despite the fact that it is a military site and not a nuclear one, stressed the paper. Iran says that the inspection of Parchin is not included in its latest agreement with the agency and that request goes beyond what is authorized under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In the past, Iran has allowed the agency access to the military site twice and it hinted that it may agree to another inspection of Parchin, if this puts an end to Iran’s nuclear case. But in the past IAEA has refused this, concluded the daily./end

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