Iran Nuclear Issues: The Bushehr project

The Bushehr Nuclear Power Facility is located 17 kilometres south of the city of Bushehr (also known as Bushire). between the fishing villages of Halileh and Bandargeh along the Persian Gulf.

The facility was the idea of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who envisioned a time when the world’s oil supply would run out. He said that, “Petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn.” Instead, he wanted a national electrical grid powered by clean nuclear power plants. Bushehr would be the first plant, and would supply energy to the inland city of Shiraz.

In 1975, the Bonn firm Kraftwerk-Union A.G., a joint venture of Siemens AG and A.E.G Telefunken, signed a contract worth $4 to $6 billion to build the nuclear power plant. Construction of the two nuclear generating units was subcontracted to Thyssen Krupp AG, and was to have been completed in ‘1981.

Kraftwerk-Union was eager to work with the Iranian government because, as spokesman Joachim Hospe said in 1976, “To fully exploit our nuclear power plant capacity, we have to land at least three contracts a year for delivery abroad. The market here is about saturated, and the United States has cornered most of the rest of Europe, so we have to concentrate on the third world.”

Kraftwerk-Union fully withdrew from the Bushehr nuclear project in July 1979, after work stopped in January 1979, with one reactor 50% complete, and the other reactor 85% complete. They said they based their action on Iran’s non-payment of $450 million in overdue payments The company had received $2.5 billion of the total contract. Their cancellation came after certainty that the Iranian government would unilaterally terminate the contract themselves, following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which paralyzed Iran’s economy and led to a crisis in Iran s relations with the West.

In 1984, Kraftwerk-Union did a preliminary assessment to see if it could resume work on the project, but declined to do so while the Iran-Iraq war continued. In April of that year, the US State Department said, “We believe it would take at least two to three years to complete construction of the reactors at Bushehr.” The spokesperson also said that the light water power reactors at Bushehr “are not particularly well-suited for a weapons program.” The spokesman went on to say, “In addition, we have no evidence of Iranian construction of other facilities that would be necessary to separate plutonium from spent reactor fuel .”

The reactors were then damaged by multiple Iraqi air strikes between March 24, 1984 to 1988. Shortly afterwards Iraq invaded Iran and the nuclear program was stopped until the end of the war.

In 1990, Iran began to look outwards towards partners for its nuclear program; however, due to a radically different political climate and punitive U.S. economic sanctions, few candidates existed.

In 1995 Iran signed a contract with Russia to resume work on the half complete Bushehr plant. The construction is being done by the state-controlled company Atomstroyexport (Russian for Atomic Construction Export), an arm of Russia’s atomic energy ministry, Minatom. The Russians claim that because the reactor will be used for civilian purposes only, their contract is legitimate under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In late 2001, U.S. intelligence officers told journalist Seymour Hersh that Iran’s most important nuclear facilities were not at Bushehr, which can be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but at clandestine sites under military control.

It was not until 2002 that the USA began to question Iran’s nuclear intentions after the MKO (an anti-government guerrilla group) revealed the existence of the Natanz and Arak facilities.