Nearly All Russian Engineers to Complete Bushehr NPP Unit 1 Work by Fall

Almost all Russian engineers consulting Iranian colleagues at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant will complete their work in the coming months, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran’s (AEOI) spokesman said Saturday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The Iranian National Regulatory Authority (INRA) issued a five-year license for Bushehr’s unit 1 after exhausting all related legal technical inspections and the necessary control, Behrouz Kamalvandi said in an AEOI’s statement.

Kamalvandi added the fewer than 60 Russian advisers working at the site would be reduced in the "coming months."

He noted that the reduction was part of Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom’s handover of Bushehr in September 2013 that saw a three-year period, in which the remaining Russian engineers would provide consulting services. At the time, there were 270 Russian engineers at Bushehr.

The AEOI spokesman stressed the "utmost importance" of attaining the license for both Rosatom as the contractor and the Iran Nuclear Power Production-Development (NPPD) company as the operator.

The Russian-Iranian agreement on the civil use of nuclear energy, followed by a deal to construct Iran's first nuclear power plant, dates from 1992. The Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant started operating in Iran in 2011 and reached full capacity the following year.

An agreement to expand civilian nuclear energy cooperation and construct a total of eight additional nuclear reactors at Bushehr was signed between the sides on November 11, 2014.

On Friday, Rosatom’s press service announced full-scale construction of Bushehr-2 and Bushehr-3 as soon as the technical aspects were resolved within the next weeks.