Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in the southern namesake city, which was temporarily closed for undergoing a technical overhaul and refueling will resume operation soon, the head of Iran Grid Management Company, an Energy Ministry subsidiary, said.
“Maintenance of the plant is expected to complete on Dec. 20, following which the facility will operate for 300 days to generate 7 billion kilowatt-hours of power before it is overhauled again,” Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi was also quoted as saying by IRNA.
The plant was shut down for refueling for 80 days in October (when electricity demand is low), whereby the depleted fuel is replaced with new fuel to produce energy from nuclear fission reactions more efficiently.
“The detection and replacement of faulty and worn-out parts were undertaken after old nuclear feedstock was moved to a secure location," he said.
Iran’s sole nuclear reactor is the first civilian nuclear power facility of the Middle East, which operates under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was built with Russian assistance.
The plant accounts for 1 gigawatt of Iran’s total power generation capacity that currently stands at 85 GW.
New Units
According to Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, construction operations at the second and third units of Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant are making headway.
Eslami noted that concrete pouring work at the site of the second unit is complete.
The construction of the first unit of the plant in Bushehr was carried out with the help of Russia. It came on stream in 2011 and reached full capacity (1,000 MW) the following year.
The first unit of Iran’s sole nuclear power plant generated over 50 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity from 2011 to 2020, which is equivalent to the energy produced by burning more than 60 million barrels of crude oil.
In 2014, Iran signed a contract with the Russian company Rosatom and its subsidiaries to build two reactors on the same site. The second unit of the plant is scheduled to come on stream in five years, while the third will be finished in seven years, following which nuclear power generation capacity will stand at 3,000 MW.
The second and third units will each have a capacity of 1,057 MW. Over $10 billion have been allocated to the two units.
Power Exchange
Referring to power exchange with neighboring states, Homayoun Haeri, a deputy energy minister, noted that selling electricity to neighboring states, which had fallen to zero, now exceeds 1,000 megawatts and will rise further.
“The state-run Iran Power Generation, Distribution and Transmission Company [Tavanir], which had to purchase close to 700 MW of power from Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia daily over the last two months, has reduced imports to less than 100 MW. The company has also started to export electricity again as the cool temperature has substantially reduced demand,” he said.
“Less than 300 MW of power were imported to Iran per day last summer when network load reached 58 gigawatts. Things have changed and the widening gap between production [58,000 MW] and demand [68,000 MW] put transmission substations and distribution networks under huge pressure, due to which explosions were reported in some substations.”
Giving a breakdown on power consumption, the official added that industries, households, agro sector and commercial units respectively use 38%, 32%, 18% and 7% of the total electricity produced in Iran. Public places like parks, walkways and bus stations account for the rest.
According to Haeri, although the country's installed capacity (80 GW) has increased in proportion to the annual economic growth, it is still not sufficient to meet the heavy domestic demand.
“Due to the unprecedented low precipitation, last winter’s output from 60 hydroelectric power plants in Iran have declined by at least 130% compared to a year ago,” he said.
The production level, which was around 10,000 MW last year, has declined to 1,000 MW.
