Iran to respond to atomic deal on Thursday

By Reza Derakhshi and Hossein Jaseb

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's envoy to the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency will present Tehran's position on a draft nuclear fuel deal with three powers in Vienna on Thursday, a semi-official Iranian news agency said on Wednesday.

Mehr News Agency said Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh would personally give Iran's response to Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, on the plan ElBaradei drafted for Iran to send most of its enriched uranium abroad.

A diplomat close to the agency said IAEA inspectors who arrived in Iran on Sunday to examine a previously secret enrichment site under construction 160 km (100 miles) south of Tehran would return to Vienna on Thursday.

Neither the IAEA nor Iranian officials have commented on the inspectors' visit to the site, aimed at verifying that it was intended to yield peaceful nuclear energy, not nuclear weapons.

The U.N. watchdog was not expected to publish its findings before its next quarterly report on Iran, due in mid-November.

Echoing a report by Iranian state television on Tuesday, Mehr said Iran would accept the framework of the U.N. draft but propose changes, a move that could unravel the plan and rekindle demands for harsher international sanctions against Tehran.

The head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, did not directly confirm the Mehr report but told Reuters Soltanieh left Tehran for Vienna early on Wednesday.

"He will meet with Mr ElBaradei at the first appropriate opportunity and present what he received in Tehran," Salehi said.

Under the draft deal ElBaradei hammered in consultations last week in Vienna with Iran, the United States, France and Russia, Iran would send low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad for further processing and eventual use in a research reactor.

It calls for Iran to transfer about 75 percent of its known 1.5 tonnes 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 power the reactor, which produces radio-isotopes for cancer treatment.

The U.S. role in the deal would entail upgrading safety and instrumentation at the plant, Soltanieh said last week.

For world powers, the plan's appeal lies in reducing the stockpile of Iran's LEU below the threshold needed for conversion into highly-enriched uranium for an atom bomb.

This would buy about a year of time for negotiations on halting enrichment in Iran in exchange for benefits to forge a long-term solution to a standoff over its nuclear ambitions.

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