Bushehr nuke plant gets license to operate
Baku, Azerbaijan, May 18
By Emil Ilgar - Trend:
The Safety System Center of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran has issued a license for operation of the country's first nuclear power plant, Bushehr.
The license was issued for five years, said Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the Organization's official website reported May 18.
He said the Bushehr nuclear power plant operated at a full capacity the last month, producing 4 percent of the country's total electricity.
Kamalvandi also said the power plant was handed over to Iran in 2013, but Russia was responsible to render consultant services for three years.
"Now, the operation of the plant is fully in the hand of Iranian engineers," he added.
He said some 270 Russian engineers were working in 2012 at Bushehr, but now their number has decreased to 60.
"The Russian engineers will all leave the power plant by September," he added.
There is no official statistics on the 1000-megawatts Bushehr power plant, but it generated about 2.5 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity during the last fiscal year, sharing around 0.9 percent of the country's total electricity generation.