Turkey confirms meeting with Iran, Brazil to discuss nuclear swap deal

           The foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey and Brazil are to meet in Istanbul on Sunday to discuss the nuclear swap deal which they agreed to in May, a Turkish foreign ministry official told Reuters on Saturday. Under the deal reached in Tehran, Iran agreed to send some of its uranium abroad, reviving a plan drafted by the United Nations with the aim of keeping its nuclear work in check. The accord failed to prevent fresh sanctions from the United Nations, European Union and United States. But Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said this month he still saw a chance of Iran doing the swap on the basis of their agreement. Davutoglu will first meet and hold a joint news conference with his Brazilian counterpart Celso Amorim at 11 a.m. on Sunday, the foreign ministry official said. They will then hold a three-way meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. It was not clear if they would then hold another news conference. The UN Security Council has already passed four sets of sanctions over Iran's nuclear program on suspicions it is being used to produce weapons and the European Union is reportedly planning to approve sanctions that would go even further than those already in place by the UN. The meeting will come the day after Iran's nuclear agency began studies to build an experimental nuclear fusion reactor, something that has yet to be achieved by any nation. Iran is not known to have carried out anything but basic fusion research, but it does have a nuclear fission program that the U.S. and its allies believe is a front to build weapons — a charge Tehran denies. Nuclear fusion, the process powering the sun and stars, has so far only been mastered as a weapon, producing the thermonuclear explosions of hydrogen bombs. It has never been harnessed for power generation. Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who also heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told a conference on the new research program that his agency has set an initial budget of $8 million to conduct "serious" research in the area of nuclear fusion. Asghar Sediqzadeh, the head of the new fusion research center said Iran will take two years to complete these studies and then another decade to design and build a reactor. "The scientific phase of the project effectively began today. We have already hired 50 experts for this purpose," he told state TV. The United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia, Japan and South Korea signed an accord in 2006 to build a $12.8 billion experimental fusion reactor at Cadarache, southern France, aimed at revolutionizing global energy use for future generations. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, members have said no single country can afford the immense investment needed to move the science forward. Salehi, Iran's nuclear chief, said Iran was willing to join any international grouping to offer its expertise to promote the project. However, he said Iran will go its own way should the world not welcome it. "We are ready to enter into cooperation with any international group or country," he told the semiofficial ISNA news agency. Salehi said it would take 20 to 30 years before nuclear fusion energy can be commercialized but that Iran seeks to make use of all the capacity inside Iran to speed up its research. (23,21)