AEOI Chief: Bushehr N. Power Plant Readying to Start Test Run in Days

Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Fereidoun Abbasi said that the country’s first nuclear power plant in the Southern port city of Bushehr is still under tests and will soon be connected to the national power grid for test run.

According to the Iranian government’s information website, Abbasi rejected the recent media reports about a halt in the operation of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, and stated, “The plant is under test, and thus, its connection to and disconnection from the (national) grid is natural due to the technical problems.”

He said that recently a problem occurred in a power generator of the plant and the Russian contractor has transferred the necessary equipments and is trying to prepare the reactor.

“God willing, it will be connected to the national grid in the next few days,” Abbasi underscored.

In December, Sergey Kiriyenko, the general director of Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, said that Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant is expected to be commissioned by mid-2013.

“Everything there has been launched,” he told Interfax at the time.

The power plant’s utmost power for the generation of electricity is 1,000mw.

Iran signed a deal with Russia in 1995, according to which the plant was originally scheduled for completion in 1999. However, the project was repeatedly delayed by the Russian side due to the intense pressure exerted on Moscow by the United States and its western allies. Russia finally completed physical construction of the plant last summer, but the facility still needed one more year to gradually reach full power generation capacity.

On October 26, 2010, Iran started injecting fuel into the core of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in the initial phase of launching the nuclear reactor.

In 2011 Iran started using 500MW of nuclear-generated electricity, half the nominal capacity of the Bushehr power plant.

Iran held a ceremony in September 2012 to mark the preliminary launch of the Bushehr plant.

The facility operates under the full supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).