Iran's atomic chief said Wednesday the country's first nuclear power plant will be ready to generate electricity by January--two months later than previously announced.
Iran
's
atomic chief said Wednesday the country's first nuclear power plant will be
ready to generate electricity by January--two months later than previously
announced.
Ali Akbar Salehi said the process of placing fuel rods at the Bushehr facility,
built by Russia, would be completed by the "middle of" the Iranian
month of Aban, around Nov. 7, the state television's website reported.
"Two or three months from then, the electricity generated by the plant
will be connected to the grid," said Salehi, chief of
Iran
's
Atomic Energy Organisation.
Iran
began
loading the Russian-supplied fuel rods Aug. 21 and Ali Shirzadian, spokesman
for the atomic body, had then said the plant would be connected to the national
grid by end of October or early November.
But Salehi later had said the loading would begin at the end of the Iranian
month of Shahrivar (Sept. 22) and by the end of the month of Mehr (Oct. 22),
the lid of the reactor would be shut.
Salehi, in an interview with Al-Alam television Aug. 31, blamed the delays on
Bushehr's "severe hot weather" and safety concerns, adding that the
loading was being done during the night.
Iran
hasn't hinted at any other reasons for the delay, but officials have
acknowledged that a computer worm is mutating and wreaking havoc on
computerized industrial equipment in the country, where an official said Monday
that about 30,000 IP addresses had already been infected.
Analysts say that the Stuxnet worm may have been designed to target
Iran
's
nuclear facilities.
Iranian officials have denied the Islamic republic's first nuclear plant at
Bushehr was among the addresses penetrated by the worm, but they have said that
personal computers of personnel at the facility have been infected.
Iran
says
it needs the Bushehr plant, which had been under construction since the 1970s and
was finally finished by
Russia
, to
meet growing demand for electricity.
But the international community widely believes that
Iran
's
atomic activities are masking a covert nuclear weapons programme, which
Tehran
denies.
Iran
is
under four sets of United Nations sanctions for its refusal to halt uranium
enrichment--the process which can be used to make nuclear fuel but also the
fissile core of an atom bomb in highly purified forms.
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