IAEA Urged to Enhance Technical Cooperation with Iran
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi on Monday said he has called on the IAEA to increase its bilateral technical cooperation with Iran to compensate for years of opportunities lost due to the fabricated nuclear case against Iran.
“During the 10-12 years that they created the fabricated case, we lost the opportunities for technical cooperation with the IAEA,” Salehi said, speaking in a joint press conference with Director-General of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano here in Tehran.
“I asked Mr. Amano to have this issue compensated for through the measures they take,” he added, noting that the two sides have entered a new phase after the recent implementation of the nuclear deal finalized between Tehran and world powers back in July 2015.
“In our talks today, it was agreed that we will look into the future, and what was in the past would remain behind us,” Salehi said.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Salehi expressed the hope that the AEOI would provide the Iranian nation with good news on the modernization of the Arak reactor in the near future, maybe within a week.
“The preliminaries of what we designed have been inspected by the other sides,” Salehi added.
“We are ahead of the planned schedule, everything is going well, and we hope that the modernization of Arak would come into effect even earlier than the plan,” the Iranian nuclear chief went on to say.
Amano’s visit to Tehran came two days after Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini announced in a joint statement that the implementation of the nuclear deal has officially been started.
With the implementation of the agreement between Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany), all nuclear-related sanctions against the Islamic Republic were terminated.
