ANKARA, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's energy minister said Friday Turkey would not say no if asked to store Iran's uranium to help solve the nuclear impasse between its Muslim neighbor and the West, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported.

    Asked if Turkey was ok with storing Iran's low-enriched uranium, Taner Yildiz said there had been no such formal requests to Turkeyneither from Iran nor from the United States but that the issue was being discussed, the report said.

    "But if such a request is made, there would be no problem about storing Iran's uranium in Turkey. We would not say no," Yildiz was quoted as saying.

    Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week in Istanbul for a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and discussed Iran's nuclear issue.

    Turkey has urged for a solution to the issue through diplomatic means and dialogue and said it is willing to mediate between Iran and the West.

    Iran is under U.S. and UN sanctions over its nuclear program, which the West fears aims to develop nuclear bombs, but Tehran defends its right to peacefully use the energy.

    A draft agreement, presented earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, has called for shipping most of Iran's existing low-grade enriched uranium to Russia and France to be processed into fuel rods with a purity of 20 percent as the fuel for Tehran's research reactor.

    However, Tehran said requiring it to hand over huge amounts of its enriched uranium in exchange for nuclear fuel for the Tehran research reactor is a digressive issue and not acceptable. Iran has threatened that in case of pressures on Iran, the country will buy its high-grade enriched uranium from foreign suppliers without exchange of its low-enriched uranium.

    The United States, Russia and France have approved the draft deal, but Iran said it wanted amendments and more talks on the issue.