Iran's first nuclear power plant has finally begun to provide electricity to the national grid, official media reported today, a long-delayed milestone in the nuclear ambitions of a country the West fears is covertly try to develop atomic bombs.
"The Atomic Energy Agency announced that atomic electricity from Bushehr power plant joined the national grid with a power of around 60 megawatts on Saturday at 23.29 ," the official news agency IRNA reported.
The start-up will come as a relief to Tehran after many years of delays and false starts at the plant it hopes will show the world it has joined the nuclear club despite sanctions imposed in an attempt to curb its disputed nuclear progress.
The $1 billion, 1,000-megawatt Bushehr plant will be formally inaugurated on September 12th, by which time it will be operating at 40 per cent capacity, Hamid-Khadem Qaemi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), told the state-controlled Arabic language TV station al-Alam.
The plant on the Gulf coast is the first of what Iran says will become a network of nuclear facilities that will reduce its reliance on its abundant fossil fuels and is a showpiece of what it says is a purely peaceful atomic programme.
Bushehr's start-up comes with Russia pushing to revive talks between global powers and Iran about its separate uranium enrichment work, seen abroad as a potential proliferation threat since highly refined uranium fuels atomic bombs.
Iran says it is enriching uranium only to lower levels suitable for power plant fuel or medical and agricultural uses.
But it has also started shifting its most sensitive enrichment operations to a mountain bunker that would be better protected against a possible pre-emptive US or Israeli military strike.
Started by Germany's Siemens in the 1970s before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Bushehr project was taken over by Russian engineers in the 1990s.
Delays fuelled speculation Moscow was using the project as a diplomatic lever over Iran.
Nuclear fuel rods were transported into the reactor building amid great media fanfare more than a year ago, but were not loaded into the reactor until later in 2010 and even then had to be removed due to technical problems.
As recently as last month Iran told UN inspectors it had temporarily shut down the Bushehr reactor for technical reasons and, separately, a special parliamentary committee said the plant was still a long way from joining the grid.
Reuters