The Bushehr atomic power plant, Iran
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Iranian Nuke Plant off Schedule by a Year
Next week, the contractor for the Bushehr atomic power plant, the Russian Atomstroiexport, will officially inform its Iranian partners of the new timeline for the launch of the plant, which will take place no sooner than September 2008. At the plant, they say the new schedule was determined by the delivery time for equipment from South Korea. They are also demanding that Iranian authorities revise the financial conditions of the contract for the plant.
An Iranian delegation led by Ahmad Fayyaz Bakhsh, deputy head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran in charge of the Bushehr project, will arrive in Moscow next week. On Tuesday, Mahmoud Jafari, who was identified by IRNA, the Iranian state news agency, as the head of the Bushehr project, issued a statement saying that the plant is 93.6 percent complete and it will be ready to launch three or four months after nuclear fuel is delivered to it from Russia. Rosatom, the Russian Federal Agency for Atomic Power, declined to comment on that statement, saying only that Bakhsh, and not Jafari, was in charge of the project.
A source at the plant told Kommersant that it would be possible to complete Bushehr by September 2008 “only with stable financing at the level of $25 million per month.” He added that financing has been and remains the biggest obstacle to the plant's completion. That is a matter of revising the contract concluded in 1995 for the construction of a plant with a capacity of 1000 MW for $1 billion. Iran has already paid $900 million of that amount.
Under an agreement between Atomstroiexport and the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Iran was to pay $25 million per month through the completion of the plant in September 2007, that is, $300 million more. According to the Russians, Iran has drastically underpaid. “Obviously, the Iranians simply don't want to pay anything above the contract,” the source commented.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of July 26, 2007
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