Iran Shows Off Controversial Nuclear Plant

Along a long, dusty road that heads south from this Persian Gulf port, past shops and green fields, rises an emblem of Iran’s differences with the United States: the nearly finished Bushehr nuclear power plant.

For the United States, as well as Europe, Iran’s nuclear program ranks as perhaps the most important issue in the outcome of today’s presidential election.

With a small army of Russian contractors welding, painting and fitting pipes inside its concrete dome and its turbine building, the $800-million plant is 84% complete and poised to receive its first nuclear fuel rods from Russia within a few months, a senior Iranian atomic official confirmed Wednesday. Officials say the plant will be in commission next year.

Iran says its pursuit of nuclear power is for peaceful purposes and falls within its rights as a sovereign nation and signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Washington thinks Bushehr might be part of a national program aimed ultimately at producing atomic weapons that could be fitted onto the short- and medium-range missiles Iran has been developing for decades.

One of the two candidates in today’s contest, Hashemi Rafsanjani, is a former president who has signaled willingness to seek a compromise with the West to avoid confrontation over the nuclear question and other issues. He is in a tight race with Tehran Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has accused Iran’s negotiators of lacking backbone in their discussions of nuclear issues with European diplomats.

The same basic process that produces low-level enriched uranium for civilian reactors can be modified to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear bombs. Western officials worry that once Iran has acquired the technology and begins to make its own nuclear fuel, there will be little to prevent it from taking the process further and making fearsome weapons.

Much of their concern is about other facilities, such as those located near Natanz and Esfahan in central Iran, that are linked to enrichment activities.

President Bush has said repeatedly that Iran should not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, and for now, the United States is backing European diplomacy. After sometimes tense negotiations with Britain, France and Germany in recent months, Iran announced that it was suspending enrichment, although it has threatened resumption several times.

Rafsanjani has indicated some flexibility on the issue, saying, “The main solution is to gain the trust of Europe and America and to remove their concerns over the peaceful nature of our nuclear industry.”

But Ahmadinejad, the favorite of Iran’s hard-line Islamic clerics and military, has defended the country’s right to go forward at full speed with what he calls “peaceful nuclear technology.”

“Those who are in negotiations are frightened and don’t know the people,” he said this week. “A popular and fundamentalist government will quickly change the country’s stance [to be] in favor of the nation.”

Late Wednesday, seeking to back up its assertion that the world had nothing to fear from the Bushehr plant, the government afforded a group of foreign reporters a rare chance to tour the plant.

The Bushehr facility was conceived in the 1970s, under the rule of the late shah. But work was suspended after the 1979 Islamic revolution and throughout the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It came back to life in the 1990s, when Iran and Russia, over U.S. objections, signed an agreement to complete the project using Russian designs and technology.

Master engineer Ismael Ibrahim Zadeh, outfitted in a neat blue jacket in spite of the 100-degree heat, took the reporters, photographers and camera operators around the separate turbine building, allowing them to record whatever they liked and proudly pointing out the massive, green-painted turbine, its generator and the condensers, with huge, yellow cranes overhead.

All around, Russian workers in hard hats concentrated on welding or rolling heavy components out to be lifted to their proper places in the maze of steel and tubing.

Seawater, heated by proximity to a closed loop of water heated by the nuclear reactor, will emerge as steam to run the turbine’s giant rotors and turn the generator for electricity.

The reactor itself is a short bus ride away. A rickety-feeling temporary outdoor elevator raised the visitors in small groups to a platform about five stories high. From the top, the shoreline half a mile away was visible, lined with guard towers facing out to sea.

An open door led from the platform into the steel-sheathed domed containment area itself. Walking over the stainless steel floor, one can peer down into a cylindrical well about 20 feet deep at the top of the installed reactor, where the fuel rods are soon to be placed.

Although Iran boasts reserves of petroleum and natural gas that are among the world’s richest, officials here argue that generating electricity by nuclear means will allow more of its resources to be exported for cash.

At a news conference held in a reception area of the plant, Asadollah Saboury, vice president of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said it would be completed by December 2006. He promised that it would operate under a safeguard regime of inspections and remote surveillance by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The IAEA is already a frequent visitor, positioning cameras and setting up systems for its round-the-clock surveillance and for transmission of photographs to its Vienna headquarters, he said.

Asked how the world could trust that Iran’s nuclear program had no military goals, Saboury focused on the Bushehr plant itself.

“There was only one concern [voiced by the IAEA] with respect to Bushehr ... and that was the spent fuel, what’s going to happen to the spent fuel? Apart from this spent fuel, it is an industrial complex,” he said, switching between English and Persian.

“As far as the spent fuel, we have an agreement with the Russians that [it] will be sent back to Russia,” he said. “So there should not be any allegations against Bushehr, because everything is crystal clear about it.”

Although the plant is a civilian installation, it is guarded by watchtowers and antiaircraft guns, evidence of the tension that has surrounded this project.

Few here have forgotten that Israeli F-16 warplanes destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor about to become operational in 1981. Neither the United States nor Israel has ruled out a similar operation against Iranian nuclear facilities if negotiations to curtail Iran’s program fail.

Experts have said, however, that it might be difficult or impossible to locate all the elements of the alleged arms program, which is presumed to be dispersed and hidden underground around the country.

Saboury said the suspension his country has agreed to does not encompass all of its nuclear activities.

“What is not in the scope of suspension, like the Bushehr NPP, they are proceeding.... There are a lot of activities, research activities, other projects, nuclear power plants. There is a long list of activities” not covered by the agreement, he said.

Saboury expressed frustration with the suspension.

“Iran likes to have the capability to make its own nuclear power plant fuel,” he said. “We are wasting our time now. We are losing the time.”

If the suspension was lifted, he said, it would be “very few years” before Iran was capable of enriching its own uranium.

Master engineer Zadeh simply shrugged when asked if he was frightened to be working in a facility that some speculate might one day be bombed.

“I lived through the Iran-Iraq war,” he said, “so for me this is nothing.”