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Ahmadinejad hails IAEA report on Iranian nuclear program

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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad highly praised Thursday the UN nuclear watchdog's report on Tehran's controversial nuclear program, the IRNA news agency reported.
TEHRAN, November 15 (RIA Novosti) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad highly praised Thursday the UN nuclear watchdog's report on Tehran's controversial nuclear program, the IRNA news agency reported.

"We welcome the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] has regained its role, and in the report by the agency head the world will see that Iran has the right to develop peaceful nuclear technologies, and our firmness on this issue is justified," IRNA quoted the Iranian leader as saying.

The report delivered on Thursday by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran had been truthful, in general, about key aspects of its "nuclear dossier," but warned that Tehran continues to work on uranium enrichment, despite persistent demands that the country fold the program.

Iran has around 3,000 functional enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear research center. The UN nuclear experts believe that the current number of centrifuges is enough to start production of nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.

In addition, the country's leaders previously said that they intended to install 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz to make the country independent of nuclear fuel imports.

Two sets of UN Security Council sanctions are currently in place against Iran over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment that could be used in both electricity generation and weapons production. A further round of more stringent sanctions has so far been blocked by China and Russia.

The report said the IAEA would continue work to obtain additional information on the nature and scale of Iran's nuclear research.

However, Mohammad Saeedi, deputy director of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, said Thursday the IAEA report confirmed that Iran had provided the international community with enough evidence to bring further investigation into its peaceful nuclear research to a close.

"It will be surprising if they continue discussing Iran's case at the UN Security Council because, based on this report, the discussion will have no legal and international basis," Saeedi told a news conference.

In late November, the six countries involved in talks on the issue - the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany - are expected to vote on a new set of sanctions against the Islamic Republic. The vote was postponed pending reports from the IAEA, and European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana.

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