Tehran, November 08: Senior Iranian lawmakers rejected on Saturday any possibility of Tehran shipping uranium abroad for further enrichment, intensifying pressures on the government to reject the UN-backed plan altogether.
Prominent conservative lawmaker Alaeddin Boroujerdi said Iran won’t ship its low-enriched uranium abroad in a single batch or in several shipments, a compromise suggested by some government officials, under any circumstances. “Nothing will be given of the 1,200 kilograms (of low-enriched uranium) ... to the other side in exchange for 20 percent enriched fuel, not in one batch nor in several. It is out of question,” the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Boroujerdi as saying Saturday.
Another lawmaker, Hossein Naqvi Hosseini, said Iran had three options to procure fuel for its reactor; to buy the fuel from other countries; to accept the UN-brokered plan; or to enrich uranium to a higher level domestically and produce the required fuel itself.
“The countries proposing ... are not trusted by Tehran because they didn’t carry out their obligations to us in the past. Therefore, the second option is out of question,” ISNA quoted Hosseini as saying.
“Exchange of uranium in return for fuel is out of question,” another lawmaker Ali Aghazadeh was quoted by ISNA as saying. “We have reached this point ourselves and we need to continue the path ourselves. It is their (US and its allies) obligations to give us fuel. If they fail to do so, we will supply it ourselves.”
-----Agencies
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