Iran has made an initial response to the United Nations nuclear watchdog on a plan to send the country’s uranium abroad for processing, but neither the agency nor Iran made the response public.

However, it came as the Iranian President made his most positive comments to date on the effort, saying: “We welcome cooperation on nuclear fuel, power plants and technology, and we are ready to cooperate.”

The plan, hammered out in talks in Vienna last week, is designed to bridge the gap between Iran’s insistence that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes and the West’s suspicion that it is building a bomb.

The proposal provides for Iran to ship 2,645 pounds of low-enriched uranium to Russia for further processing. That amount, representing most of the country’s known stockpile of low-enriched uranium, would take about a year to replace.

The uranium would be returned to Iran in the form of fuel rods, usable only in a civilian nuclear facility and not for weapons.

A crucial question is whether Iran will demand alterations to the plan or will insist on shipping the material in installments, which would undercut the intent of the deal: to leave Iran without enough nuclear material to build a weapon as the West works toward an international agreement on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In his comments from Mashad, broadcast on state television, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not address the possibility that Iran might insist on gradual shipments or seek changes to the agreement. His remarks seemed to extend Iran’s two-track public position on the nuclear dispute, offering a degree of compliance with one hand while insisting on the other that there were limits to its readiness for cooperation.

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