Russia has completed the shipment of uranium fuel for Iran's first nuclear plant, officials said yesterday.
Irina Yesipova, a spokeswoman for Russia's state Atomstroiexport company in charge of building the nuclear plant in the southern port of Bushehr, said the eighth and final shipment of 8.6 tonnes of uranium fuel had been delivered overnight.
Iran received the first shipment of nuclear fuel from Russia on Dec. 17 after months of dispute between the two countries, allegedly over delayed construction payments for the reactor.
Overall, more than 120 tonnes of uranium fuel had been delivered, Yesipova said.
Iran has said Bushehr, the country's first nuclear reactor, will begin operating in the summer, producing half its 1,000-megawatt capacity of electricity.
Yesipova said that a firm date for the plant's launch hadn't been set yet.
"It will be necessary to conduct complex work related to preparations for the launch with security being the top priority," she said.
The US initially opposed Russia's contract for building the Bushehr reactor and supplying it with fuel, but later softened its position as Iran agreed to return spent nuclear fuel from the reactor to Russia to ensure it doesn't extract plutonium from it to make atomic bombs.
Russia's decision to ship nuclear fuel to Iran followed a US intelligence report released last month that concluded Tehran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in late 2003 and had not resumed it since. Iran says it never had a weapons program.
The US and Russia have said the supply of nuclear fuel means Iran has no need to continue its own uranium enrichment program -- a process that can provide fuel for a reactor or fissile material for a bomb.
Iran has insisted it would continue enriching uranium because it needed to provide fuel to a 300-megawatt light-water reactor it was building in Darkhovin.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees