"We have currently 3,000 operational centrifuges and delivered more than 100 kilogrammes of enriched uranium to warehouses," said Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, quoted by the ISNA news agency.

He added that Iran had also stocked more than "150 tonnes of uranium gas."

Iran has come under intense US-led pressure and UN sanctions over its nuclear programme which it insists is for peaceful purposes and to which it has a right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The West suspects Tehran's work is aimed a producing nuclear weapons.

Later on Friday, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, is due in Vienna to meet Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

That meeting will be followed on Saturday by talks in Portugal between Larijani and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana

Iran has been slapped with two sets of UN Security Council sanctions and it is likely to face a third for its refusal to suspend sensitive enrichment work, the process which makes nuclear fuel but can also, in highly-enriched form, provide the fissile core of an atom bomb.

"With resolutions in series you will get nothing," leading cleric Hojatoleslam Ahmad Khatami warned the West during Friday prayers in Tehran.

"The only solution to resolve the Iranian nuclear question is logical and just negotiation," he said.

He pointed out that the UN Security Council had adopted resolutions against Iran and got nowhere. "If the European leaders had a little logic, they should understand this reality, that resolutions adopted one after another will make nothing change."

On Thursday, in an interview with the American magazine Newsweek, Larijani also asked what the Security Council resolutions had achieved. "Have the past two resolutions impeded our activities?" Larijani was quoted as asking.

"They can pass another resolution, and we would make another, longer stride," he said, refusing to elaborate on what this meant but saying it would not necessarily mean accelerating the uranium-enrichment programme.

"We don't see a need for a higher degree of enrichment. Because our basic theory is to (create civilian nuclear) fuel. And we don't need higher (weapons) grades of enrichment," he told the magazine.

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