TEHRAN, July 24, (Agencies): A top Iranian official said on Saturday that Tehran was conducting studies into building an experimental nuclear fusion reactor, which if successful would be the first such plant in the world.
“Studies and examining the feasibility of a national plan titled ‘Designing and building experimental nuclear fusion reactor and plant’ are under way,” Asghar Sedighzadeh, head of Iran’s Nuclear Fusion Research Centre was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency. He did not elaborate.
Earlier on Saturday, Iran’s atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi said an eight-million-dollar fund had been set up to conduct “serious” research in the area of nuclear fusion.
He said 50 people had been hired for the work, which the Islamic republic began nearly three decades ago but was initially “not very serious” about pursuing.

“Fusion research has been launched seriously today,” ISNA quoted Salehi as saying.
“The start-up budget is 80 billion rials (eight million dollars),” he said.
“It takes 20 to 30 years before this process can be commercialised but we have to use all the capacity in the country to provide the necessary speed for fusion research.”
Nuclear fusion has long been touted as the cheap, safe and clean energy source of the future, but efforts to harness it for power generation have so far failed to bear fruit.
Fusion is used in the hydrogen bomb, in which fissile material like that in a simple nuclear warhead launches the process by which atomic nuclei fuse together to release energy.
Iran has always rejected Western suspicions that its nuclear programme is aimed at developing a weapons capability.
In May, North Korea said it carried out a nuclear fusion reaction that could lead to an almost limitless supply of clean energy, a process that scientists have so far yet to achieve.
Physicists worldwide are striving to develop a nuclear fusion power plant, a project which the International Atomic Energy Agency terms “a great challenge.”

Warship
Meanwhile, the former naval chief for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said the country has set aside 100 military vessels to confront each warship from the US or any other foreign power that might pose a threat, an Iranian newspaper reported Saturday.
Such a military confrontation in the vital oil lanes of the Persian Gulf would be of major global concern. The warning builds on earlier threats by Iran to seal off the Gulf’s strategic Strait of Hormuz — through which 40 percent of the world’s oil passes — in response to any military attack.
“We have set aside 100 military vessels for each (US) warship to attack at the time of necessity,” Gen. Morteza Saffari was quoted as saying by the conservative weekly Panjereh.
The US and Israel have said military force could be used if diplomacy fails to stop what they suspect is an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Iran denies any aim to develop such weapons and says its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes like power generation.
The US Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters is based just across the Gulf from Iran in Bahrain.
Saffari said more than 100 foreign warships were currently in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman, adding that their sailors were “morsels” for Iran’s military to target, the newspaper reported.
“Any moment the exalted supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) orders — or should the enemy carry out the smallest threat against (Iran’s ruling) Islamic system — the Guard ... is ready for quick reaction,” he was quoted as saying.

By putting the number of foreign warships at 100, the general appeared to suggest Iran has 10,000 military vessels at the ready. Iran is known to have many speed boats used by the Guard, but there is no public information about how many larger military vessels it has.
In January 2008, five small high-speed vessels believed to be from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard briefly swarmed three US Navy ships passing near Iranian waters in the Gulf and delivered a radio threat to blow them up.
The war of words has intensified between Iran and the West since the U.N. Security Council imposed tougher sanctions last month in response to Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment, a technology that can be used to produce nuclear fuel or material for an atomic bomb.
Iran put its most powerful military force, the Revolutionary Guard, in charge of defending the country’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf in 2008.
“We believe the enemy, through extensive psychological warfare, wants to coerce us, but Iran ... is ready,” said Saffari, who was the Guard’s navy chief until early May. “The enemy won’t dare attack Iran.”
Space
In another report, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday that Iran plans to send a man into space by 2019 as a blow to Western powers pressing Tehran over its nuclear programme, state news agency IRNA reported.
“Iran was due to send man into space by 2024 but in response to threats and Security Council resolutions against Iran, the plan was pushed forward by five years and the project will be launched in 2019,” Ahmadinejad said.
Iran, which is under four sets of UN Security Council sanctions over its continued uranium enrichment work, has been pursuing an ambitious space programme, firing rockets into space and building satellites.
In February Iran launched a home-built satellite carrying a rat, turtles and worms, in the face of Western concerns about Tehran using its nuclear and space industries to develop atomic and ballistic weapons.
Telecommunication Minister Reza Taghipour said this month that Iran plans to launch a new satellite, Rasad 1, in the last week of August.
The minister had previously said that during the current Iranian year to March 2011, new satellites capable of transmitting data and images would be launched.
Ahmadinejad has dubbed his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev the “mouthpiece” of Iran’s enemies, in the latest tirade born of rising differences between Tehran and Moscow.
“In a meeting with his ambassadors, he (Medvedev) said we have knowledge that Iran is moving towards the bomb,” Ahmadinejad was shown saying in footage broadcast by state television on Saturday.

“We regret that Medvedev has become the mouthpiece for the plans of Iran’s enemies,” the hardline president said in the footage filmed at a gathering in Tehran on Friday.
On July 12, Medvedev made his toughest remarks to date about the Iranian nuclear programme, which Tehran has always insisted is entirely peaceful in aim.
“Iran is nearing the possession of the potential which, in principle, could be used for the creation of a nuclear weapon,” he told Russian diplomats.
Three days later, Medvedev warned Iranian leaders that they did not “live in space” and accused them of exploiting the nuclear standoff with the international community for political ends.
“Iran is an active trade partner of ours. But this does not mean that we are indifferent to how Iran is developing its nuclear programme,” Medvedev said at a news conference alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Meanwhile, Iran said on Saturday that it has arrested suspected accomplices of two suicide bombers who attacked a Shiite mosque in the restive southeast earlier this month killing at least 28 people.
“Some of those who helped the suicide bombers behind the Zahedan crime have been identified and some have been arrested,” state news agency IRNA quoted deputy interior minister Ali Abdollahi as saying.
He did not specify how many were in custody.
“It is evident to us that the people who carried out the terrorist attack in Zahedan’s Jamia mosque were linked to the Rigi group,” Abdollahi said, referring to the Sunni militant group Jundallah, whose longtime leader Abdolmalek Rigi was executed in Tehran last month.
Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, claimed the July 15 twin bombing in Zahedan, capital of Sistan-Baluchestan province, which it said targeted members of the elite Revolutionary Guards.
The group says it is fighting for the rights of the province’s large, mainly Sunni Baluchi population in Shiite-dominated Iran.
Police said that the day after the twin bombing they killed six “criminals” in Sistan-Baluchestan province and arrested 40 people for “creating disturbances” in Zahedan.

Swap
Meanwhile, the foreign ministers of Iran, Brazil and Turkey will meet in Istanbul on Sunday to discuss a nuclear fuel swap proposal they brokered in May, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki will meet with his Brazilian and Turkish counterparts, Celso Amorim and Ahmet Davutoglu, “in Istanbul tomorrow morning to discuss... the Tehran Declaration about the fuel swap,” ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency.
The Istanbul meeting will be the first between the three sides since the United Nations Security Council imposed a fourth set of sanctions against Iran on June 9 over its controversial nuclear drive.
The May 17 declaration by Iran, Brazil and Turkey stipulates that Tehran would send 1,200 kilogrammes of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Turkey, to be supplied at a later date with high-enriched uranium by Russia and France.

It was immediately cold-shouldered by world powers which went ahead and backed the fresh UN sanctions against Iran for refusing to halt its sensitive uranium enrichment programme.