After years of delays mostly motivated by international political problems, Iran finally started up the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in August, and had fully loaded it for energy production by November, seemingly putting the plant on the fast track to being part of the electricity grid in the nation.
But this weekend, Iran has informed IAEA inspectors that they are going to have to remove the fuel from the Russian-built plant and “conduct some experiments and technical work,” a major setback for the plant’s viability in the near term.
Exactly what happened is unclear, but the unloading of fuel is no small endeavor and would not have been undertaken lightly. The move is bound to add to concerns that the Stuxnet worm, a collaboration between the US and Israeli governments, hit the plant as well as other Iranian nuclear infrastructure. The Iranian government denied that the worm hit the plant.
The plant was a key part of the Iranian efforts to free up more oil for export, and if fully functional it was believed it would have added another 11 million barrels of oil for international export per year. It was also to be the first of many such plants for Iran.
But given the problems in getting the plant up and running it may soon force the government to admit that the effort for civilian energy production is simply not yielding worthwhile results. Exactly where the problem came from is the biggest question, however, because the plant should not have been nearly so difficult for the Russian contractors to get up and running in a timely fashion.
Stuxnet hype is discussed at Iranian Affairs: http://www.iranaffairs.com/iran_affairs/2011/01/d…
The reason for the fuel rod removal — which is hardly unexpected for a newly-made plant — is explained here and has nothing to do with Stuxnet: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110228/ap_on_re_eu/i…
Remember, as noted earlier in the piece, the plant has as much a political purpose as a energy purpose. Standing up to Uncle Sam is good local politics. The problem with the last line is that its the western view that all of this is harming Iran, thus if the plant isn't making energy it should close. But, the nuclear weapons program has always seemed to be popular inside Iran precisely because it opposed the 'west' and caused so many 'problems'.
If the US hadn't made such a huge political fight over the years about this issue, then maybe the problems at the plant might logically lead to a shut down. But, since the US has made the whole program into such a huge point of pride, then problems at the plant will just mean they'll keep working to solve them.
And … deliberately sabotaging nuclear facitilities, by 'worm', or by other means you probably know are being tried if they are also trying the worm, has got to be one of the stupidest things ever thought of by man. If the US is behind something like Stuxnet, and if there's a major nuclear disaster that can get linked to that or similar black arts espionage, then the US would be a pariah nation for the next thousand years. Chernobyl still has a 20 km exclusion zone around it. Imagine what the world would thing for generations to come if the US creates another such zone somewhere in the world by trying to sabotage other nuke programs? We'll all be claiming to be Canadians when we travel.
As stuxnet was attuned to a particular type of control system apparently used in UF_6 centrifuges [but to all evidence had no effect at all, breathless reporting by the NYT notwithstanding; there was detailed analysis at Mondoweiss, its effect on a totally different machine like a russian-built VVER is bound to be 0.