Russia ships uranium to fuel Iranian nuclear facility

RUSSIA will load fuel into Iran’s first nuclear power plant next week despite US demands to prevent Iran obtaining nuclear energy until the country proves that it’s not pursuing a weapons capacity, officials said yesterday.

Uranium fuel shipped by Russia will be loaded into the Bushehr reactor on August 21, beginning a startup process that will last about a month and end with the reactor sending electricity to Iranian cities.

“From that moment the Bushehr plant will be officially considered a nuclear-energy installation,” said Sergei Novikov, said a spokesman for the Russian nuclear agency.

Russia signed a $1 billion (€783m) contract to build the Bushehr plant in 1995 but it has dragged its feet on completing the project.

Moscow has cited technical reasons for the delays, but analysts say Moscow has used the project to press Iran to ease its defiance over its nuclear programme.

Russian officials say that UN sanctions against Iran, including a new, more stringent set approved in June, don’t directly prevent Moscow from going ahead with the Bushehr project. It has argued that the Bushehr project is essential for persuading Iran to cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog and fulfill its obligations under international nuclear nonproliferation agreements.

Russian officials did not say why they had decided to move ahead with loading fuel into the Bushehr plant now.

The uranium fuel used by the Bushehr plant is enriched to a level too low to be used in a nuclear weapon. Iran is already producing uranium enriched to that level – about 3.5% – and has started a pilot programme of enriching uranium to 20%. Iran claims it needs the 20% enriched uranium to produce fuel for a medical research reactor, but the move has further heightened international concerns about its nuclear programme.

Uranium must be enriched to over 90% to be used in a nuclear warhead.

Iran’s semiofficial ISNA news agency quoted Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also the head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, as saying that the country had invited International Atomic Energy Agency experts to watch the transfer of fuel, which was shipped about two years ago, into the Bushehr reactor.

“Fuel complexes are sealed (and being monitored by IAEA). Naturally, IAEA inspectors will be there to watch the unsealing,” ISNA quoted Salehi as saying.

Russia has said that the Bushehr project has been closely supervised by the UN nuclear watchdog, which declined comment yesterday. It also says Iran has signed a pledge to ship all the spent uranium fuel from Bushehr back to Russia for reprocessing, excluding a possibility that any of it could used to make nuclear weapons.

Russia is one of the six powers leading international efforts to ensure Iran does not develop an atomic bomb.