Iran is to produce nuclear fuel for a research reactor by September 2011, its atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi reiterated on Tuesday as Tehran defiantly presses on with higher level uranium enrichment.
"By the month of Shahrivar next year (September 2011), we will produce fuel for the reactor," Salehi said, quoted by the state IRNA news agency.
In February, Iran started refining uranium to 20 percent after a deadlock in a nuclear fuel swap deal drafted by the UN atomic watchdog and aimed at providing fuel for the Tehran medical research reactor.
Iran has already said that by next September it will domestically produce the required fuel and the actual fuel plates to power the reactor, but Western powers say it does not possess the technology to make nuclear fuel plates.
The Islamic republic is under four sets of UN Security Council sanctions over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, the process at the centre of fears about Iran's atomic work.
Enriched uranium can be used as fuel to power nuclear reactors as well as to make the fissile core of an atom bomb. Tehran has repeatedly denied Western accusations that it is working to produce a nuclear bomb.
Iran and a group of six world powers — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — are to hold talks on Tehran's overall nuclear programme in December.
Salehi said on Tuesday that Iran would make an announcement on its progress in the nuclear field "two to three weeks" after the meeting with world powers, Mehr news agency reported.
He did not elaborate.
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