EU says to hold nuclear talks with Iran in Brussels ‘this week’

Chief of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Mohammad Eslami (R) and Iran’s Governor to the International Atomic Energy Agency Kazem Gharib Abadi at the IAEA’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria. (File/AFP)

• IAEA says Tehran’s enrichment to high levels at Natanz plant is expanding
• US backs EU-Iran discourse but calls Vienna ‘ultimate destination’

LONDON: The EU’s top negotiator will meet his counterpart from Tehran this week in Brussels for talks on restarting negotiations over Iran’s nuclear deal, a spokesman for the bloc said on Monday.
The EU and world powers are scrambling to try to get negotiations in Vienna aimed at reviving the 2015 accord back on track after the election of a hard-liner in Tehran.
Iran’s chief negotiator on the deal, Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri, wrote on Twitter that he would be in Brussels on Wednesday “to continue our talks on result-oriented negotiations.”
EU spokesman Peter Stano said the meeting would involve the bloc’s lead negotiator Enrique Mora, who visited Tehran earlier this month to push Iran to restart full negotiations.
Stano said the EU’s diplomatic service was “sparing no efforts to resume talks of all parties in Vienna.”
The agreement between Iran and world powers to find a long-term solution to the now two-decade-old crisis over its controversial nuclear program has been moribund since former US president Donald Trump walked out of the deal in May 2018.
His successor Joe Biden has said he is ready to re-enter the agreement, so long as Iran meets key preconditions including full compliance with the deal whose terms it has repeatedly violated by ramping up nuclear activities since the US left the pact.
But the Vienna-based talks through intermediaries made little headway, before being interrupted by the election of hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi as Iran’s president and suspended for the last four months.
The EU acts as coordinator for the deal that also involves Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia.
This comes as the UN nuclear watchdog said on Monday that Iran is expanding its enrichment of uranium beyond the highly enriched threshold of 20 percent purity at a Natanz plant where it is already enriching to 60 percent, but the new activity does not involve keeping the product.
The move is likely to help Iran refine its knowledge of the enrichment process — something Western powers generally condemn because it is irreversible — but since this time the product is not being collected it will not immediately accelerate Iran’s production of uranium enriched to close to weapons-grade. It has, however, prompted the International Atomic Energy Agency to “increase the frequency and intensity of its safeguards activities” at the above-ground Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) at Natanz, the IAEA said in a report seen by Reuters. As of around 90 percent uranium is considered weapons-grade.
The IAEA said in a statement outlining the report that Iran informed it last week of changes to the setup of centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium, at the plant — Iran would feed uranium enriched to up to 20 percent into limited numbers of extra centrifuges without collecting the product.
“On 25 October 2021, the Agency verified that Iran began feeding (uranium hexafluoride gas) enriched up to 20 percent U-235 into a single IR-6 centrifuge in R&D line 2 at PFEP and that the resulting product and tails streams were being re-combined,” the IAEA report said, meaning that after separating the enriched product it was mixed with the centrifuge’s waste and not kept.
Iran had said it planned to also feed uranium enriched to up to 20 percent into other single centrifuges or small- to medium-sized cascades, or clusters, of machines on the same line, but those were not being fed at the time, the IAEA said.
Meanwhile, the US said on Monday that it supported the EU’s engagement with Iran as coordinator of the lapsed nuclear deal, but stressed that the “ultimate destination” to try to revive the accord was to resume talks in Vienna.
“The EU is the JCPOA coordinator. And we are very supportive of the EU’s engagement with Iran in that capacity,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters, referring to the deal by its formal name, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “That said ... the ultimate destination needs to be Vienna,” Price added. 
(With AFP and Reuters)