The remark was made by the head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran on Saturday, in a New Year meeting with the AEOI officials and staff; “we will start the project once we reach a consensus, and we hope that the construction will happen this year. We have also plans for the construction of two small 100-megawatt power plants.”
Russia has already built a 1,000-megawatt power plant in the southern Iranian port city of Bushehr, operating under the full supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which reached its maximum power generation capacity in August 2012.
In November 2014, the two countries struck a deal to build eight more nuclear power plants in Iran. According to Sergey Kiriyenko, head of Russia’s Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation, the Russian side is about to complete the survey of the seismological situation in Bushehr for the construction of the two power plants.
Salehi then touched upon the regional crises such as the emergence of ISIL, saying ‘livelihood’ and ‘security’ are the two essential pillars of Islam; “thankfully, Iran has managed to maintain the pillar of security quite well in the country, and despite the difficult living conditions, the nation has moved forward with perseverance.”
“Those who imposed these difficult conditions on us to compel us to surrender are now gripped with a far greater dilemma themselves,” he added.
He further talked about Iran’s nuclear deal and its achievements, saying “our enrichment is still in place. Before the deal, there were 9000 centrifuge machines that used to produce enriched uranium, now we have 6000, 1000 of which are empty while the rest does the enrichment. This does not impose any restrictions on our nuclear energy program.”
He went on to add, “we cannot produce fuel that is going to be several times costlier than the international price. We should try to keep the costs of our produced fuel almost at the same level of the international price.”
He stressed that if it were not for the wisdom of Iran’s Leader Ayat. Khameni in the course of nuclear negotiations, Iran would have lost the game ‘in thousand different ways.’
“If the Leader had not explicitly forbidden interrogation of our nuclear scientists and experts on the issue of PMD, the other side would have taken a different approach other than closing the case on PMD,” he said.
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