TEHRAN, Iran — Nuclear talks between Iran and six world powers, including the United States, are due to begin Friday in Istanbul, Iranian state media said Sunday.

Iran’s official English-language Press TV quoted an unnamed official at Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, which handles the country’s nuclear program, as setting the date and place of the talks. Reuters quoted a spokeswoman for the European Union foreign policy chief confirming that the talks will take place this week in Istanbul.

The site had been in question after Iranian politicians declared that Turkey, a key negotiator in the talks, was no longer neutral ground because it actively opposes Syria, an Iranian ally. The uncertainty about the location had prompted Western worries that Iran was not planning to seriously engage the world powers — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — in the first talks since January 2011.

The six nations are expected to press Iran to accept curbs on its nuclear program that would make it far more difficult for Tehran to build a nuclear weapon.

A key demand, Western diplomats say, is that Iran halt production at its uranium enrichment plant near Qom, a Shiite holy city about 90 miles south of Tehran.

The United States also expects Iran to fully suspend production of 20 percent enriched uranium, which Iran says it needs to power a 43-year-old U.S.-built nuclear test reactor that produces radio isotopes.

In a signal that Iran is willing to negotiate over its stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Fereydoon Abbasi, said Sunday that his country had already “foreseen” to stop that activity and lower the enrichment levels.

The closure of the facility near Qom, called Fordow, requested by Western officials, is “not logical,” Abbasi said, stressing that the mountain bunker was no different from Iran’s main nuclear facility at Natanz.

Last month, some prominent Iranian elected officials and analystssaid it was highly unlikely that Iran would accept even a temporary halt in its production of enriched uranium.

“Please do not make the general public expect any freeze on the enrichment of uranium,” said Hossein Sheikholeslami, a former Iranian ambassador to Syria and once a leader of the student movement that took 52 U.S. Embassy workers hostage in 1979. “We regard this as our inalienable right.”

 

Copy the Story Link