TEHRAN, April 7. /TASS/. Iran’s parliament has approved the agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program reached in Switzerland’s Lausanne last week, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi said on Tuesday.
The deal paves the way for a future final agreement envisages that nuclear waste will be removed from the country, Salehi said.
"We agreed that Iran should join the international consortium. Nuclear waste that presents significant ecological threat for Iran and for the world, will be removed from the country and stored at safe places," the Mehr News Agency quoted the AEOI head as saying.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif confirmed that the Additional Protocol to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons must be approved by the parliament before it can be implemented.
"I explained to Western diplomats that Iran is capable of producing an atomic bomb any time it wants. We are stopped not by sanctions under the pressure of which the country is living. We are stopped by the ideology outlined in the fatwa issues by Ayatollah [Ali] Khamenei," Zarif said. In 2013, the Supreme Leader of Iran issued a fatwa saying the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.
On April 2, Iran and P5+1 group (Russia, US, UK, China, France and Germany) reached a breakthrough agreement in Switzerland’s Lausanne on restricting Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for gradual lifting of sanctions. The deadline for coordinating the final agreement is June 30.
According to the deal, Iran will not enrich uranium no higher than to 3.67% for the next 15 years. Tehran will also cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium from around 10 tons to 300 kilograms. Iran agreed not to set up new facilities for uranium enrichment in the next 15 years, and vowed not to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and conduct research in this sphere.