The Russian nuclear agency blamed the problem on Iran for requiring that the Russians use equipment bought before the revolution in the 1970s for the plant.
Russia has often complained that Iran was making foolish demands to integrate Russian and German equipment, often demanding that the Russians put a round peg in a square hole.
In this case, the Russia agency, known as Rosatom, said Iran had insisted on using a pump that was a third of a century old and should have been scrapped.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced Friday that Iran had informed it on February 23 that “it would have to unload fuel assemblies from the core.”
But the very same day Iran was telling the IAEA of the problem, Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi, who has headed Iran’s nuclear program the past year, told the state news agency, “The reactor cap in the Bushehr plant has been shut and everything is ready to produce electricity in the near future.”
Salehi either was not told what was going on at Bushehr or was misleading the public.
Only the day after the IAEA publicly announced what it had been told did Iranian officials acknowledge that fuel would have to be removed from the reactor, further delaying its start, which is now more than 12 years overdue.
No one in Iran said what the problem was or how long the repair work would take. Iranian officials simply said that Russian engineers had said the fuel removal was required.
But Rosatom issued a statement Monday saying it had discovered internal damage in one of the pumps used in the cooling system, It said it needs to check whether the fault was caused by tiny metal shavings and whether those shavings had reached the reactor’s nuclear fuel assembly via the coolant water.
“If we find metal shavings in the fuel assembly, all the assembly will be washed, the core of the reactor vessels cleaned, after which the fuel will be reloaded into the reactor of the power unit,” the statement said. It did not give an estimated time to completion.
The statement complained that the pumps “were part of the equipment supplied to the Bushehr site in the 1970s, which, according to the contract, Russia was obliged to integrate into the project.”
The Bushehr project was started in the mid-1970s by the German firm Kraftwerke Union. Work was halted after the revolution by the revolutionaries who damned the nuclear plan as one of the Shah’s wasteful “prestige projects.” Later, when the regime changed its mind, the Germans refused to come back.
The plant was said to be about 85 percent complete when work halted in 1978. When the Russians took over in 1995, they suggested just starting from scratch, but Iran wanted to use what had already been paid for. The Russians said it would be difficult and costly to try to combine Russian and German technology and equipment, but Iran insisted. The Russians have said that is the main reason the project is so far behind.
Ali-Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, did not acknowledge any pump damage. Before the Russian announcement, he spoke of removing the fuel for “experiments.”
In a statement to reporters Saturday, he said, “The fuel in the reactor core will be taken out for some time to conduct experiments and technical work. After the experiments, it will again be installed in the core.”
The further delay led to much speculation in the media that the Stuxnet computer worm may have caused the problem. However, as reported previously in the Iran Times, a German worm specialist who has devoted months to studying Stuxnet has said Stuxnet was designed only to attack cascades of centrifuges at Natanz and would have no impact on operations at Bushehr or any of the other thousands of industrial facilities where the worm has been found.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC, told The New York Times that unloading a newly fueled reactor was not unprecedented by any means.
He said it is done about once in every 25 to 30 fuelings of reactors. In Canada, he said, a reactor was recently fueled and then scrapped after the discovery of very serious technical problems.
Olli Heinonen, who once led the IAEA inspections at Bushehr and is now at Harvard University, said the Russians are still in charge of Bushehr. He said full responsibility is only “supposed to be turned over to the Iranians after the first refueling, which is estimated to take place perhaps two years from now.”