AFP

Tehran

Iran’s dispute with world powers over its unfinished Arak heavy water reactor has been “virtually resolved”, it said yesterday, less than a month before nuclear talks seeking a permanent agreement.

The facility - whose remaining components Iran cannot commission or install under an interim agreement struck in November - is of international concern as it could theoretically give Tehran a second route to a nuclear bomb.

Nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said Iran and the so-called P5+1 group of world powers were now seeing eye to eye on the Arak reactor after Tehran offered to make certain changes.

“Our proposal (is) to redesign the Arak reactor and to reduce its plutonium production to one-fifth,” Salehi said in remarks posted in Arabic on the website of Iran’s Al-Alam television.

“It was welcomed by the P5+1... the issue is virtually resolved,” he added without elaborating.

Western governments have monitored the small research reactor with alarm in the past few years over concerns Tehran could theoretically extract weapons-grade plutonium from its spent fuel if it also builds a reprocessing facility.

Located 240km southwest of Tehran, the reactor has been plagued by a series of delays, however, and its stated completion date of 2014 is expected to slip back even further.

But a year after it eventually comes on line, it could provide Iran with an alternative to highly enriched uranium for use in a nuclear bomb.

With Tehran insisting the reactor would create isotopes for medical and agricultural use, it has also made efforts in recent months to allay relating concerns by agreeing to submit to the UN nuclear watchdog updated design information and finalise a safeguards mechanism for it.