October 26, 2009

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Monday it could endorse a U.N. deal for it to send potential nuclear fuel abroad for processing, the first official indication that Tehran could respond positively to the outline agreement.

The remark by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was the most positive yet from a senior Iranian official and hinted at a shift in backroom debate between hardliners and moderates in the faction-ridden Iranian leadership on whether to accept the deal.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said it was urgent for world powers to make a lasting deal with Tehran to avert an Israeli strike over its disputed nuclear program.

"They (Israel) will not tolerate an Iranian bomb. We know that, all of us. So that is an additional risk and that is why we must decrease the tension and solve the problem. Hopefully we are going to stop this race to a confrontation," Kouchner said.

"There is the time that Israel will offer us before reacting, because Israel will react as soon as they know clearly that there is a threat," he added in an interview published by Britain's Daily Telegraph daily.

In Iran, Iranian officials said U.N. inspectors were given access to a hitherto secret uranium enrichment site bunkered inside a mountain near the holy Shi'ite city of Qom.

The four senior experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency intended to verify Tehran's stance that the plant was designed to make only low-enriched fuel for electricity, not the high-purity version for nuclear arms.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the Iranian parliament's national security and foreign affairs committee, said later the inspectors had carried out their mission and suggested they may leave Iran later on Monday, ISNA news agency reported.

Diplomats in Vienna, where the IAEA is based, said the inspectors, who arrived in Iran on Sunday, had been expected to stay several days. It was not known if they had been granted all the access and provided all the documentation they wanted.

The IAEA declined to comment.

Understandings on the fuel plan and U.N. monitoring of the enrichment site under construction were struck at high-level Geneva talks between Iran and six world powers on October 1.

They see the deals as litmus tests of Iran's stated intent to use enriched uranium only for peaceful ends, and a basis for more ambitious negotiations on curbing enrichment in Iran to defuse a crisis over its nuclear aspirations.

IRAN LEANING TOWARD APPROVING FUEL PLAN?

Mottaki said Iran could either send part of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile abroad for specialized processing into fuel for a Tehran nuclear medicine facility that is running out of it, or buy the material from foreign suppliers.

"In order to obtain this fuel, we might spend money as in the past or we might present part of the fuel that we have right now, and currently do not need, for further processing," he was quoted by the official news agency IRNA as saying.

He said the Islamic Republic would announce its decision "in the next few days." Iran missed a Friday deadline set by the IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for giving a reply to the proposal he hammered out in consultations with Iran, Russia, France and the United States in Vienna last week.

Prominent lawmakers have said since then that Iran should not send out any of its LEU reserve, suggesting it was a strategic asset Tehran could not afford to relinquish while facing Western pressure to shelve enrichment entirely.

But some officials have privately suggested Iran in the end is likely to accept the deal, although it remained unclear how much LEU Tehran would agree to shift abroad, and when.

One Tehran analyst, who declined to be named, said the outcry over the draft would allow Iran to present its eventual acceptance as a major concession in the hope this would deflate pressure on it to shelve enrichment, a step it rules out.

The draft pact calls for Iran to transfer some 80 percent of its known 1.5 metric tons of LEU to Russia for further enrichment by the end of this year, then to France for conversion into fuel plates. These would be returned to Tehran to fuel a research reactor that produces radio-isotopes for cancer treatment.

The U.S. role would be upgrading the reactor's safety and instrumentation, Iran's envoy to the U.N. watchdog said.

For the powers, the deal's value lies in cutting the quantity of Iran's LEU needed to fuel a bomb, if it were highly enriched. If 80 percent were removed, Iran would need about a year to replenish it at its current rate of enrichment.

Boroujerdi told Iran's Arabic language television that LEU should be sent out only "gradually" in several smaller batches, with guarantees, to protect against chicanery by Western powers he said had violated nuclear supply deals in the past.

Iran is years away from having any civilian nuclear power plants to run with LEU it is rapidly amassing, raising Western suspicions about the underlying goal of its enrichment campaign.

Western power diplomats say Iran was forced into revealing its second enrichment site near Qom to the IAEA a month ago because their intelligence agencies had already detected it.

The inspectors aimed to compare engineering designs to be furnished by Iran with the actual look of the facility, interview scientists and other employees, and take soil samples to check for evidence of illicit military nuclear activity.

(Additional reporting by Parisa Hafezi and Hashem Kalantari in Tehran; writing by Mark Heinrich; Editing by Samia Nakhoul)