Skip to main content

Russia's atomic proposal still on table - Iran

Iran on Sunday said it would be willing to discuss Moscow's proposal to move uranium enrichment to Russia if the U.N. Security Council were to send its case back to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

"The Russian proposal is still on the table," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a news conference.

"Within this framework it is normal that we will review different proposals on when it is carried out and under what conditions," he added.

Iran, which says its nuclear programme is for energy not weapons, could face a new resolution at the U.N. Security Council after the IAEA reported on Friday Iran has hampered its checks and rebuffed requests to stop making nuclear fuel.

U.N. ambassadors from the United States, Britain and France were expected to begin drafting a resolution on Monday they hope to introduce within a week which would obligate Iran to comply with the council's demands.

With the clock ticking towards possible Security Council action, Tehran has remained defiant and said it would continue to enrich uranium and develop its atomic energy programme.

But in the past two days Iran has suggested steps to ease the crisis.

On Saturday Iran offered to allow spot checks by IAEA inspectors if the Security Council dropped the case. On Sunday, Iran said it would consider Moscow's plan under which uranium for use in Iranian power stations would be enriched in Russia.

"Research enrichment has started and it is going on and it is irreversible," Reza said.

"We want to see to it that industrial enrichment and industrial production should come from the heart of negotiations," he added.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Does light have mass?

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m

Play against Xbox360 gamer on PC in Vista

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates on Tuesday announced a cross-platform gaming service that integrates games played on cell phones, Xbox 360 consoles and the upcoming Windows Vista operating system. The "Live Anywhere" service will be available as part of Windows Vista, Microsoft's next-generation PC operating system. The consumer version is scheduled for release early next year. "It means that you have one online community," Gates said in a news conference. "This platform can really unleash developers to do amazing new things." The system would extend the company's existing Xbox Live service for the Xbox 360 console into millions of Internet-enabled PCs and cellular phones. No pricing information on the new service was announced. In recent months, Microsoft has been pushing a number of online services that it hopes will boost revenue as markets for its traditional software become increasingly saturated. The company expects to make money off s

Hackers biting Apple

Hackers are increasingly focusing on Apple's Mac OS X, and the number of newly discovered vulnerabilities has surged. Such a switch could mean big implications for Apple's user base, which has traditionally not had to concern itself too much over security. It's been an impressively quiet year so far on the PC virus and worm front, and hackers seem to be focusing their attention elsewhere. One such area is Apple's Mac OS X. Once mostly ignored by malware developers, there appears to be a growing interest in this "alternative" OS. Details Have you noticed the dearth of serious PC virus and worm threats out there lately? Well, it isn't a figment of your imagination -- according to vnunet.com, viruses are no longer the top security threat . While serious attacks are still likely to emerge, the bottom has apparently fallen out of the PC antivirus market -- just as Microsoft begins a big push into the security market. One cause of this drop-off is solidif