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by Staff Writers Tehran (AFP) Jan 17, 2014
Iran denounced Friday as "one sided" a text released by the United States summarising the implementation of the nuclear deal Tehran struck with world powers. "The White House statement is a unilateral and one-sided interpretation of the unofficial agreements between Iran and P5+1" major powers, foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said. "By no means it is a criterion to evaluate or judge how the Geneva deal will be implemented," she added in statements carried by the official IRNA news agency. In November, Iran agreed at talks in the Swiss city to roll back parts of its nuclear programme and halt further advances in exchange for the release of billions of dollars in frozen assets and limited relief from crippling sanctions. Implementation of the six-month deal struck with the P5+1 group of Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States plus Germany, is slated to begin on Monday. On Thursday the White House released a summary of "technical understandings" for implementation, which includes a timetable for inspecting Iranian nuclear facilities by the UN nuclear watchdog. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts are to arrive in Iran Saturday. They are due to be deployed at nuclear sites identified in the November agreement to ensure Tehran complies with its part of the deal, Iranian officials have said. The text released by the White House also contains a payment schedule for nearly $7 billion (5.2 billion euros) in blocked Iranian foreign exchange holdings, a modest easing of sanctions in return for a freeze on some parts of the Iranian nuclear programme. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the full text was made available to a restricted group of lawmakers and congressional aides. He said the IAEA wants to keep certain aspects of the deal confidential, Carney said. Washington released the text after US officials were forced to deny claims that there was a secret side deal accompanying the November deal. Opponents of the deal, including Israel, said it gave up too much to Iran in return for too limited commitments to slow its nuclear activity. And some in Congress want to slap new sanctions on Iran.
Iran says UN experts to inspect uranium mine this month "The inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency will travel to Tehran on January 29 to visit Gachin mine," AEO spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi told Iran's official IRNA news agency. Iran agreed a framework deal with the UN nuclear watchdog in November that includes six steps Tehran must carry out by February 11. "The agenda for negotiations between Iran and the IAEA which will take place on February 8 on how to implement the second phase is not clear yet," Kamalvandi said. As part of the first phase of the deal, UN experts visited the heavy water plant at the unfinished Arak reactor on December 8, when all of the IAEA's "technical objectives" were met, the Vienna-based agency said. At least a year from completion, the Arak reactor is a major source of concern for Western powers, who fear the plutonium it will produce as a by-product could provide Iran with an alternative route to an atomic bomb. The November deal also allows UN experts to visit the Gachin uranium mine in southern Iran -- which has been off-limits to IAEA inspections since 2005. "For Gachin... the IAEA wants to have as accurate a picture as possible of how much uranium feedstock it has," Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told AFP. Hibbs said there were some question about "who has managed the operation and to whom they reported". In November, Iran's nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said the "six-step annex" deal signed with the IAEA was a show of Tehran's good will. "The visit to Gachin is therefore to some extent a confidence building measure toward what the IAEA hopes would be the eventual ratification and implementation of Iran's additional protocol," said Hibbs. The additional protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty provides for snap inspections of nuclear facilities by the IAEA and requires that information be provided on all activities regarding the nuclear fuel cycle. Iran is a signatory of the NPT and voluntarily implemented the additional protocol between 2003 and 2006, but ceased applying it after its nuclear programme was referred to the UN Security Council. As it stands, Iran is only obliged to inform the IAEA three months before it transfers fissile material into a nuclear facility. Another analyst, Mark Fitzpatrick of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he foresaw no shock discoveries from the Gachin visit. "There are no grounds for suspicion that anything worrisome is taking place at Gachin," he said. "Applying safeguards to the mine will help the IAEA confirm the absence of a secret enrichment path, which would have to start with obtaining uranium ore."
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