News

Launch of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant postponed

TEHRAN, Jul 21,
> 2009 -- Xinhua
>
> The launch of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant operation has
> been postponed, the semi- official Fars news agency reported on
> Tuesday.
>
> The Bushehr nuclear power plant will launch operation by the end
> of 2009, Iran's Ambassador to Moscow Seyed Mahmoud Reza Sajjadi told
> Fars on Tuesday.
>
> Sajjadi said that Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russian Rosatom, the
> state nuclear energy corporation, "announced that the company has a
> plan to launch the operation of Bushehr plant by the end of this
> year."
>
> Kiriyenko made the remarks during a meeting held in Moscow with
> Deputy Head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization Mohammad Saeedi,
> according to Sajjadi.
>
> In April, Iran's Energy Minister Parviz Fattah said the Bushehr
> nuclear power plant will start to generate electricity from mid-
> summer.
>
> "Bushehr nuclear power plant will generate 500 megawatt
> electricity from mid-summer," Fattah was quoted as saying by local
> IRNA news agency.
>
> The operation of the Bushehr nuclear power plant had been
> Iranians'
> old dream, he added.
>
> The country's 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant originally
> started in the mid-1970s by Siemens of Germany but was abandoned with
> the outbreak of the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution.
>
> Iran and Russia, after reaching an agreement on nuclear
> cooperation in 1992, signed a contract in January 1995 to finish the
> construction of the plant, the completion of which has been repeatedly
> delayed.