The ceremony for the construction of the 2nd and 3rd nuclear reactors took place in Iran on September 10, 2016.
Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi stated that the works to build both plants will be completed in the within 10 years.
Salehi said the Islamic Republic will have to pay 10 billion dollars to build these facilities, and praised Moscow's emphasis on the cooperation agreement to use the technical capabilities of Tehran in implementing the plan.
The Bushehr plant is the 1st nuclear power facility in the Arab Middle East.
Project manager Mahmoud Jafari said the reactors will have significant impacts on Iran's economy. At the ceremony, he announced that 8,000 jobs would be created and is expected to save 11m barrels of oil a year – cutting emissions of greenhouse gases by seven million tonnes.
The new units in Bushehr will rise following models of nuclear plants called Third Generation-Plus certified by the European Organization Requirements Utility so it will use unique technology and a new concept of security.
Sergey Kiriyenko, Head of Russia's Rosatom, told reporters the new facility would be built according to high safety standards, «particularly those defined after Fukushima,» referring to the Japanese nuclear power plant that was badly damaged in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Iran's top nuclear official, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the project would be monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency and was in line with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. He called the project «a new page in the trend of our peaceful industrial nuclear activities.»
Western nations do not view the Bushehr plant as a proliferation risk because Russia supplies the fuel for the reactor and takes away spent fuel that could otherwise be used to make weapons-grade plutonium.
Rosatom has already been contracted to build 36 nuclear reactors in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa and is the world’s number one builder of nuclear reactors abroad.
