IRAN will begin operation of the country's first nuclear power plant within months, the country's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said yesterday, two days after the arrival of a second delivery of nuclear fuel from Russia.
Mr Mottaki said Russia, which is helping build the light-water reactor in the southern Iranian town of Bushehr, will have completed nuclear-fuel shipments by summer 2008, paving the way for it to start working at half its 1,000 megawatt capacity.
After months of delay, Russia began shipping nuclear fuel to Bushehr in mid-December and completed its second delivery on Friday.
The Iranians have said Russia will send a total of 82 tons of nuclear fuel in eight shipments.
"Half of the capacity of the Bushehr nuclear power plant will be launched in the summer of the coming year," Mr Mottaki said.
The process was held up by Russian claims that Iran had delayed construction payments for the reactor, but many observers suggested Moscow was also unhappy with Tehran's unwillingness to assure the international community that it was not developing nuclear arms.
Tehran heralded the initial shipment as a victory, saying it proved its nuclear programme was peaceful, not a cover for weapons development as claimed by the US and some of its allies.
The US initially opposed Russian participation in building the Bushehr reactor and supplying it with fuel, but reversed its position about a year ago to obtain Moscow's support for the first set of United Nations sanctions against Iran.
Washington was also influenced by Iran's agreement to return spent nuclear fuel from the reactor back to Russia to ensure it does not extract plutonium to make atomic bombs.
Russia's decision to begin shipping nuclear fuel to Iran followed a US intelligence report earlier this month that concluded Tehran had stopped its nuclear-weapons programme in late 2003 and had not resumed it since. Iran insists it never had a weapons programme.
It also came after the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had been truthful about its past uranium-enrichment activities.
The US downplayed the first delivery, and both Washington and Moscow said the supply of nuclear fuel meant Iran had no need to continue its uranium-enrichment programme – a process that can provide fuel for a reactor or fissile material for a bomb.
Iran insisted it would continue enriching uranium because it needed to provide fuel to a 300-megawatt light-water reactor it was building in the south-western town of Darkhovin. Iranian officials have said they plan to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity through nuclear energy in the next two decades.
The US has pushed through two sets of UN sanctions against Iran, demanding it suspend uranium enrichment, and has been urging Security Council members to pass a third set.
Iran has defied the UN's demands, and Washington's effort to impose harsher measures has been complicated by the recent intelligence report as well as by resistance from Russia and China.
