Nuclear power is on the grid at last in Iran

iran’s first nuclear power plant has finally begun to provide electricity to the national grid, official media reported yesterday, a long-delayed milestone in the nuclear ambitions of a country the West fears is covertly try to develop atomic bombs.

“The Atomic Energy Agency announced that atomic electricity from Bushehr power plant joined the national grid with a power of around 60 megawatts on Saturday,” the official news agency IRNA reported.

The start-up will come as a relief to Tehran after many years of delays at the plant it hopes will show the world it has joined the nuclear club despite sanctions imposed in an attempt to curb its disputed nuclear progress.

The £616 million, 1,000MW plant will be formally inaugurated on 12 September, when it will be operating at 40 per cent capacity, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran told the state-controlled TV station al-Alam.

The plant is the first of what Iran says will become a network of nuclear facilities that will reduce its reliance on its abundant fossil fuels and is a showpiece of what it says is a purely peaceful atomic programme.

Started by Siemens in the 1970s before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Bushehr project was taken over by Russian engineers in the 1990s. Nuclear fuel rods were transported into the reactor building more than a year ago, but were not loaded until later in 2010 and then had to be removed from the reactor due to technical problems.

Malcolm Grimston, a nuclear expert at London’s Chatham House, said: “It is a milestone in the sense that it is their first full-scale power reactor, but it doesn’t change any of the major arguments [about Iran’s wider nuclear programme].”