Baku, Azerbaijan, June 3
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
Iran has completed fuel change and semi-basic repairs at the Bushehr nuclear power plant (NPP), the director of the NPP, Hossein Derakhshandeh said.
Changing about one-third of power plant's fuel and scheduled overhaul as well as necessary tests after fuel change were finalized and the facility is preparing to resume electricity generation, Iran's official IRIB news agency quoted Derakhshandeh as saying on June 3.
The facility produced 6.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity so far, the director said, adding that the main part of the produced electricity has been supplied to the to country's electricity network.
The core of the Bushehr reactor is composed of 163 fuel assemblies of which 54 should be changed every year, he underlined. The power plant halted activities temporarily to change about 27 tonnes of its fuel early in February.
Supplying the fuel of Iran's only nuclear power plant -Bushehr, is guaranteed by Russia for 10 years. Russia delivered 82 tons of nuclear fuel in 2008 and 30 more tons in May 2011 to Iran. This amount meets the Bushehr NPP's fuel needs for four years.
Bushehr NPP which was inaugurated in September 2013 has a capacity of producing 1000 megawatts of electricity. The power plant is scheduled to produce up to 5 billion megawatt hours of electricity per year, which is about 2 percent of country's total electricity production.