Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Iran has ruled out proposals backed by the major powers for it to ship out more than 70 percent of its stocks before receiving any nuclear fuel in return, the ISNA news agency reported.

Major powers which had endorsed the plans warned Iran that time was running out before a resort to more punitive action but added that the door was not yet shut to further dialogue.

Mottaki said Iran is prepared to consider the idea of a simultaneous exchange of uranium for fuel but the UN nuclear watchdog, which has been brokering the negotiations, has already said that idea is unacceptable to the Western powers.

"We will definitely not send out our 3.5 percent enriched uranium," Mottaki said.

He said Tehran is ready to "consider swapping the fuel simultaneously in Iran" and is prepared to enter new talks with the major powers.

However International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei already made clear earlier this month that there is no possibility of changing the provision for Iran to ship out its uranium stocks before receiving higher enriched fuel for a Tehran research reactor.

A simultaneous exchange "would not defuse the crisis, and the whole idea is to defuse the crisis," ElBaradei said in an interview with the New York Times.

Western leaders have expressed fears that Iran might covertly divert some of its uranium stocks and enrich them further to the much higher levels of purity required to make an atomic bomb, an ambition Iranian officials strongly deny.

Western governments support the UN-brokered deal because they believe it would leave Iran with insufficient stocks of low-enriched uranium with which to make a bomb.

The United States said the international community was "not quite" at the point of switching from trying to engage Iran to pressuring it over its nuclear programme.

"What was said today doesn't inspire... our confidence that they're going to deliver up a positive response," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said.

"We're not going to close any... door on the engagement track, but at a certain point I think we're going to start paying a little more attention to the other track," Kelly said.

"We're not quite at that point right now, but as I said before, I think that time is short."

France, which had been set to play a central role in the proposed deal, said it would continue to speak with Iran but voiced disappointment at the "negative" stance so far.

"There is a clear and negative response from the Iranians," Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said.

Iran's envoy to the UN nuclear watchdog Ali Asghar Soltanieh said the main problem was a lack of trust between Tehran and Washington after three decades of diplomatic rupture.

"We want to be sure that there is a guarantee that we will receive the fuel at the end of the day for the Tehran research reactor," Soltanieh told reporters in Vienna.

The IAEA chief told the New York Times there was "total distrust on the part of Iran" and said that compromise proposals were being explored, including the possibility of storing the Iranian uranium in a "third country, which could be a friendly country."

But on November 7, an Iranian official dismissed the idea. "Iran will not send its enriched uranium to any country," ISNA quoted the official as saying.

The issue was again raised during a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Ankara earlier this month but on Monday Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkey is still awaiting Iran's reply.

"The Iranians trust us... but there is a great opposition within Iran. They say the problem is not Turkey, but the fact that the uranium will be taken abroad," the mass-selling Hurriyet daily quoted Davutoglu as saying.

"From our point of view, the door is open. We will store that (the uranium) as a kind of a trustee," he said.

Mottaki said Iran is still considering how much of its stocks of low-enriched uranium it should ship out in any deal.

Under the IAEA-brokered proposals, Iran would send out 1,200 kilogrammes (more than 2,640 pounds), which would then be further enriched by Russia and converted into fuel by France before being supplied to the Tehran reactor.

"The amount they mentioned for the swap is not acceptable ... and our experts are still studying it," the Iranian foreign minister said.

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