The US is willing to talk to Iran about an earlier aborted plan to supply fuel for a Tehran research reactor in exchange for low-enriched uranium from the Islamic Republic, the US State Department said on Wednesday. “We obviously are fully prepared to follow up with Iran on specifics regarding our initial proposal involving the Tehran research reactor”, spokesman Phillip Crowley told journalists. He also said the White House was interested in “trying to fully understand the nature of Iran’s nuclear program.”

“We hope to have the same kind of meeting coming up in the coming weeks that we had last October,” he went on.

Senior diplomats from the so-called Iran Six of Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US met Iranian officials in Geneva in October to discuss an agreement on a fuel swap, but the agreement eventually fell through. The draft agreement proposed by IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei would have seen Iran send out about 80% of its known 1.5 metric tons of low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would have been enriched, and to France to convert it into fuel plates for the research reactor in Tehran.

Western powers suspect Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons under the guise of its nuclear program, which Tehran says is aimed at the peaceful generation of civilian energy.

source: RIA Novosti