Like you suggest that Iran should give up any hope of having electric power 20 years for now, or else accept that they are forcing us to nuke them.
Iran had a third choice. Fully comply with all IAEA inspection requirements. Prove that not one milligram of enriched uranium is being diverted.
Instead, they chased IAEA inspectors out of the country, and continued to enrich uranium without international inspectors present.
Note that Iran fully complied with IAEA rules until last October, and doing that got them nothing whatsoever.
The way they can avoid being nuked is simple: do not build atomic bombs, and allow it to be seen that they are not building atomic bombs. By accepting all inspection requirements. By ceasing and desisting from having a missile program.
Unilateral disarmament and liberal democracy would help too, but let's not pile too much on the list, so that they have a realistic chance to avoid being nuked.
Iran can have electricity. Even without handing out foreign exchange to buy it from Russia. As long as we know there is absolutely zero chance of them attacking any other country, such as Israel, with a WMD.
This is unreasonable how? (Particularly from the viewpoint of an Israeli: they're people just like us, except we don't have to worry much about Indian uprisings these days.)
From the POV of an Israeli, this is all shining golden truth. From the POV of an american statist imperialist it's quite reasonable.
Try looking at it from an Iranian point of view. It looks to them like the USA is waging covert war against them, and has been for a very long time.
If you look at the sanctions in the context of that war, it looks very very different. We imposed sanctions on Iraq, and (after an attempt at secretly building bombs that was discovered in plenty of time) Iraq fully complied with inspections, and we inserted spies among the inspectors to take GPS measurements at every site we might someday want to bomb. We insisted that Iraq was about to get nukes when the inspectors found nothing. We told the inspectors where to look and they still found nothing. We invaded Iraq, and there was nothing the Iraqis could have done to avert that invasion. At one point Bush demanded that they give us Saddam and his sons to stop an invasion, and when it looked like they might do it he then piled on a bunch of new demands.
Now you say that Iran should take our word that all we want is proof that they aren't making nukes, and we'll be satisfied. .... When we've been doing covert war against them a lot longer than we did against Iraq.
If I was Iranian I would emphatically want to have the whole fuel cycle operating in my country. We have uranium to mine, we have everything we need, why should we artificially put a noose around our neck that foreigners can tighten whenever they want to? If we depend on foreigners for a vital step to make our reactor fuel then any time the USA can get sanctions imposed they can shut down our electricity. Why would any reasonable Iranian accept that?
I would want nuclear weapons. Compare the way the USA treats Iraq versus North Korea and Pakistan. When China got nukes they went from a pariah nation to having a place on the UN Security Council. If Iran gets nukes the USA will probably back off. Until then there's every reason to think the USA will continue its undeclared hardly-secret war.
I would want to arrange smuggling with Russia and China, and particularly with Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Pakistan -- none of whom have any big desire to aid the USA and all of whom have officials open to bribes -- to smuggle whatever sanctioned items are needed.
The US war against Iran isn't shared by a whole lot of nations, though they pay it some lip service. And there is no obvious way for Iran to end that war until the USA decides to end it for their own reasons -- the USA hasn't even given them any plausible way to unconditionally surrender. So the hope would be to just hang on, and if possible avoid getting bombed or invaded, and with luck the US economy will collapse before the Iranian economy does.
When you present your reasoned arguments they sound, well, reasonable. But if the USA is actually fighting a covert war like it did against Iraq, and giving in to US demands will result not in the end of the war but only in tightened pressure against a weakened Iran, what can they possibly have to gain by hurting themselves?
If the USA was serious, if all we wanted was to keep Iran from having nuclear weapons, we might suggest the following compromise:
Israel has nukes, and has threatened to nuke a non-nuclear nation, Egypt. They have made not-so-veiled threats to nuke Iran. We tend to assume that Iran can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, and we have solid evidence that Israel cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. So let's make the entire middle east including Israel a nuclear-free zone with stringent inspections, and with videos of the actual inspections released to the world public.
Israel would be far better off with no nukes in the middle east than they are having nukes themselves. Everybody in the middle east would be better off.
And if the Israelis refuse to go along, then the USA has no obligation whatsoever to keep the people they talk about nuking from getting nukes also.