The site, scheduled for seven years, would cost between 1.5 and 2 billion dollars and would endow the country with a second nuclear power plant.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
Iran started the construction of a new nuclear power plant in the province of Khouzestan, in the southwest of the country, the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency (OIEA) announced on Saturday. The site, whose launch was confirmed on state television by the head of this institution Mohammad Eslami, should last seven years.
The center of 300 megawatts, erected in the Darkhovin district, will cost between 1.5 and 2 billion dollars, added the vice-president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The country already operates a nuclear power plant in Bouchehr, in the country’s extreme-south-south, with a power of 1,000 megawatts.
Originally, the Dharkovin power plant “should have been built by a French company” which rear back on “its commitments” after the Islamic revolution in 1979, according to the chief of the energy organization atomic. “Then the other countries avoided cooperating with the Islamic Republic of Iran because of the sanctions,” continued Mr. Eslami.
As part of a historic agreement concluded in 2015, Iran had agreed to freeze its uranium enrichment activities in Fordo, an underground factory located 180 kilometers south of Tehran. The authorities were committed to limiting the enrichment threshold to 3.67 % within the framework of this agreement concluded by Iran on the one hand, and by the United States, China, France, the Kingdom- Uni, Russia and Germany of the other.
The Pact (JCPOA) offered Tehran a reduction in international sanctions in exchange for guarantees that Iran would not have the atomic weapon, an objective that the Islamic Republic has always denied pursuing. However, after the retreat of the United States of the JCPOA in 2018 under the chairmanship of Donald Trump and the restoration of American sanctions which suffocate its economy, the country has gradually freed its obligations.
Iran thus initiated in January 2021 the process intended to produce uranium enriched at 20 % in the Fordo factory. Then in April 2021, he announced that he had started producing uranium 60 % enriched in Natanz, approaching the 90 % necessary to produce an atomic bomb.
Last month, Tehran announced that he started producing Uranium in Fordo enriched at 60 %, a new sprain in his commitments. Negotiations to relaunch the 2015 agreement began in April 2021 but they are stopped in recent months, after a renewed tensions between Iran and the great powers participating in the agreement.