Iran is to launch its first nuclear power reactor next week, the Islamic republic and Russia which helped build the plant said yesterday after years of delays to the highly sensitive project.
The US said the announcement showed that Tehran no longer needed to pursue its controversial programme of uranium enrichment.
“We are preparing to transfer the fuel inside the plant next week... Then we will need seven to eight days to transfer it to the reactor (core),” said Iran’s atomic energy chief, Ali Akbar Salehi.
“On August 21, the fuel will be transferred inside the building in which the engine” of the Bushehr power station in southern Iran is located, he said, quoted by Iran’s Fars news agency.
Mr Salehi added that Iran had invited inspectors from the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to attend the launch ceremony.
“The fuel is sealed and IAEA inspectors must be present to remove them,” he said.
The rest of the Russia-supplied fuel will be transferred to the core on September 5, Mr Salehi said. It would take two more weeks for the reactor to reach 50 per cent of its power generation capacity, allowing it then to be linked to the national grid, the atomic chief added.
In Washington, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the fact that Russia was “providing the fuel, and taking the fuel back out” for reprocessing shows that “Iran doesn’t need its own enrichment capabilities.”
Mr Salehi’s comments yesterday came soon after Russian atomic agency Rosatom said the Bushehr plant would be formally launched in just over a week’s time.
Russia has been building the plant since the mid-1990s but the project was marred by delays, and the issue is hugely sensitive amid Tehran’s standoff with the West and Israel over its nuclear ambitions.
The UN Security Council hit Tehran with a fourth set of sanctions on June 9 over its nuclear programme, and the US and EU followed up with tougher punitive measures targeting Iran’s banking and energy sectors.
Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a hardline senior cleric who heads a key parliamentary oversight committee, vowed yesterday that Iran would never buckle under sanctions.
“The West’s problem is that they do not know the Iranian nation and do not know who they are dealing with,” Irna news agency quoted him as saying.
President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia said earlier this month that Iran was close to attaining the potential to build a nuclear weapon, the first time a Russian leader had warned so explicitly of the dangers of Tehran’s nuclear drive.
Ties between Moscow and Tehran have cooled in recent months as Russia toughened its line on Iran’s nuclear drive, but Prime Minister Vladimir Putin this year confirmed the plant would start up in the summer.