From rxpgnews.com
UN nuclear agency shelves Iran reactor aid
By DPA,
Nov 24, 2006 - 5:49:28 AM
Vienna, Nov 23 - The 35 members of the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency - Thursday decided to drop an Iranian request for technical aid for its heavy water reactor currently under construction at Arak in western Iran.
After lengthy deliberations by the United Nations nuclear watchdog's technical cooperation committee preceding the session, the board decided by consensus to adopt the agency's technical cooperation programme with the exception of Arak, diplomats attending the session said.
'The board approved the technical cooperation programme with the exception of... -, on which no decision was taken,' a diplomat said. The programme will be reissued with the Arak project appearing as an annex.
This solution leaves some room for diplomatic ambiguity. US Ambassador Gregory Schulte told reporters that the Arak project was 'not deferred. It was not put on hold. It was removed entirely for the IAEA programme', while other delegations offered differing interpretations.
Iran's Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh offered a different interpretation.
The request 'was not deleted, because there was no ... legal justification for deleting it, and therefore we are expecting as soon as possible the decision to be made', he said, adding Iran would move ahead with the construction of Arak as planned.
Western IAEA members had refused to consent to help Iran with a project that the board had asked Teheran repeatedly to 'reconsider,' owing to concerns that Iran could use the research reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Iran's request was regarded as an attempt to abuse the technical cooperation committee as a political forum, one Western diplomat said.
Iran requested IAEA help for several other projects, in those cases the IAEA provided assurances to concerned members that these projects would not contribute to uranium enrichment-related or fuel reprocessing activities Iran was asked to stop, a report by the committee said. Altogether the committee conveyed a list of more than 800 projects for the next two years to the board for consideration.
The board, convening for a regular meeting on Thursday and Friday also discussed the latest report by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei on the UN nuclear watchdog's investigation of Iran's nuclear activities. In his statement to the board, ElBaradei said the IAEA 'had not been able to make any further progress' on resolving outstanding issues.
'We are going through a period of standstill,' Elbaradei told reporters. The lack of progress was mainly due Iran's decision to limit cooperation with the Agency by stopping voluntary implementation of the additional protocol and linking further cooperation and transparency measures with decisions by the UN
Security Council, ElBaradei said, urging Iran for further cooperation.
ElBaradei informed the board that in the last days Iran inched forward, agreeing to Agency requests for further environmental samples from equipment at a technical university and access to the operating records of its fuel enrichment plant at Natanz.
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