IAEA chief Grossi hopes to hold talks with Iranian president by November By Reuters

By Francois Murphy

VIENNA (Reuters) – U.N. chief Rafael Grossi hopes to hold talks with new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian by November to improve Iran’s cooperation with his agency, he said on Monday.

Some long-standing issues are Iran’s lingering relationship with the International Atomic Energy Agency, including Tehran’s ban on uranium enrichment experts from the inspection team and its failure for years to account for traces of uranium found at undeclared sites.

“He (Pezeshkian) agreed to meet with me at an appropriate time,” Grossi said in a statement at a quarterly meeting of his agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors, referring to an exchange after Pezeshkian’s choice in July.

“I encourage Iran to facilitate such a meeting in the not-too-distant future so that we can establish a constructive dialogue that quickly leads to real results,” he said.

With nuclear diplomacy largely deadlocked between Iran’s Nov. 5 and U.S. presidential elections, Grossi said he wants to make real progress soon.

Asked at a news conference whether his reference to the “not too distant future” meant before or after the US election, Grossi said: “No, hopefully before that.”

IAEA board resolutions ordering Iran to urgently cooperate with the uranium trace investigation and calling on it to lift a ban on inspectors brought little change, and quarterly IAEA reports seen by Reuters on August 29 showed no progress.

Iran responded to the latest resolution in June by announcing an expansion of its enrichment capacity, installing more centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium, at its Natanz and Fordow sites.

At its site in Fordow, dug into a mountain, where it enriches up to 60 percent purity, nearly 90 percent of the weapons grade, it installed two of eight new cascades, or clusters, of advanced IR-6 centrifuges in a few days after the notification. IAEA of its plan. Two weeks later, he had installed two more.

By the end of the quarter, the latest IAEA reports showed that Iran had completed the installation of all eight new cascades but had not yet brought them online. At its larger underground site at Natanz, which is enriched to 5% purity, it has brought online 15 new cascades of other advanced models.

“What we see is that there is some work, but nothing that indicates a rush to a rapid implementation of a large increase in enrichment production,” Grossi said.

Iran has stepped up its nuclear activity since 2019 after then-US President Donald Trump abandoned a deal struck under his predecessor Barack Obama in which Iran accepted restrictions on its nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.

Western diplomats say there are plans for talks on new restrictions should Democrat Kamala Harris win the election.