TEHRAN // As Iran began loading its first nuclear power plant in Bushehr yesterday, government officials vowed that the enrichment of uranium would continue despite the four rounds of sanctions the UN had imposed against the country. "To meet the country's 20,000 megawatt electricity requirements, Iran will continue enrichment of uranium for nuclear power plants that it is planning to build in the future," Ali Akbar Salehi, the vice president and head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, said yesterday at a joint press conference with Sergei Kiriyenko, the chief of Rosatom, Russia's nuclear energy agency, which built the plant.
Mr Salehi said the inauguration of the Bushehr power plant was a testiment to Iran's perseverance in achieving its "legitimate objectives", adding that the launch of the nuclear power plant was a peaceful symbol of Tehran's civilian nuclear programme and "a victory over enemies". The United States and other western countries believe that Iran aims to use enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb and the UN sanctions have been adopted in an attempt to stop the Islamic republic from producing the fuel needed to do so.
The UN Security Council on June 9 hit Tehran with a fourth set of sanctions over its uranium enrichment effort. Both Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, and the foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, stressed yesterday that the country would remain committed to its obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog. Iran has said that the IAEA will be able to verify that none of the Bushehr nuclear power plant's fresh fuel or waste is diverted.
"The start-up of Bushehr power plant heralds surmounting the serious impediments created unjustly by some countries in the way of our peaceful use of nuclear technology. We can continue our peaceful programmes with speed," Mr Mehmanparast told the Islamic Republic News Agency. "We have serious co-operation with IAEA and at the same time are very serious about our right to peaceful nuclear activities."
The hard-line leader Hamid Reza Taraqi said the power plant will boost Iran's international standing and "will show the failure of all sanctions" against the country. In Washington, the State Department spokesman Darby Holladay told Agence France-Presse yesterday that the US did not view the plant itself as a "proliferation risk". The launch of the reactor "underscores that Iran does not need an indigenous enrichment capability if its intentions are purely peaceful. We recognise that the Bushehr reactor is designed to provide civilian nuclear power", he said.
But Mr Salehi, Iran's nuclear energy head, also said yesterday that the country will continue searching for locations suitable for building 10 new nuclear enrichment sites, which is most troubling to the US and the UN Security Council. "We are in no rush but it is possible that we start building one of the new sites next year if ordered by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," he said.
The Iranian president told the Qatari daily Al-Sharq in an interview published yesterday that if the power plant is attacked militarily, the response will be "hard and painful". "Our options will have no limits... They will touch the entire planet," he said. "I believe that some think about attacking Iran, especially those within the Zionist entity. But they know that Iran is an indestructible bulwark and I do not think their American masters will let them do it."
The Bushehr nuclear power plant, in southern Iran, was officially started by the transferring of fuel rods from a storage facility outside the reactor compound to a pool located beside the reactor's core. The 163 fuel rods that have been kept in a storage facility under IAEA supervision since January 2008 need to be inspected and transferred to the pool inside the reactor compound one by one. The process is expected to take seven or eight days. About 10 more days will be needed to feed the rods to the reactor core to prepare it to generate electricity.
Russia will supply the 82 tonnes of fuel needed for the operation of the plant over 10 years, and by virtue of an agreement signed in 2007, Iran will return the nuclear waste from the plant to Russia, which agreed to complete Bushehr power plant, abandoned by the original German contractor after the Islamic revolution of 1979, after signing a US$1 billion (Dh3.67bn) contract with Iran in 1995. msinaiee@thenational.com
* With additional reporting by The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse
