TVEL, a subsidiary of Russia’s state-run nuclear energy company Rosatom, said it will deliver nuclear fuel to Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant by the end of August.
The new batch of fuel was manufactured at the Novosibirsk’s chemical concentrates plant in accordance with Russia’s contractual obligations and is ready for shipment to Iran, the company said in a statement Thursday.
The loading of fuel is scheduled for September in the presence of international experts during a planned maintenance of the plant, TVEL said.
“Thus, the Iranian nuclear reactor will be connected to the country’s energy system on time without any disturbance to the consumers, as well as to nuclear and radiation safety,” the statement said. Iran is hard pressed for power amid sizzling temperatures that have pushed electricity consumption to record highs. Iran’s power generation capacity of 70,000 MW is the Middle East’s largest, but the country has to add up to 1,000 MW a year to its grid to keep pace with rising demand.
On Thursday, Deputy Energy Minister Houshang Falahatian said the provinces of Tehran, northern Mazandaran and Khuzestan near Bushehr were the most vulnerable to possible power outages. Iran began building the Bushehr plant in the mid-1970s with the help of Germans and French, but it took more than three decades to complete the 1,000-megawatt facility. In 1995, Iran signed a deal with Russia.
The facility on the Persian Gulf coast is Iran's first nuclear power plant, currently generating electricity at full capacity.
Iran plans to build a network of nuclear power plants with a capacity of 20,000 MW by 2020 to cut its heavy reliance on hydrocarbons. Iran and Russia signed an agreement in Moscow in November 2014 to build two more 1,000-MW units in Bushehr.
