until about December, Fereydun Abbasi-Davani, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, announced Monday.
It was the latest of dozens and dozens of completion announcements made since January 1999, when the contract with Russia called for the plant to be producing electricity.
Meanwhile, Majlis Deputy Hossain Amiri-Khamkani said it was unlikely that Iran would ever contract with Russia to build more power reactors in the country.
Russia has been seeking more contracts and Iran has said Russia would be at the top of the list for consideration. But Iran has also said consistently that it wouldn’t be signing any more construction contracts until the Bushehr plant was completed.
No one other than Russia was willing to sign the contract with Iran in the 1990s to build Bushehr, and no country is likely to be willing to do so now apart from Russia and, possibly, China.
Abbasi said the plant would soon be operating at 40 percent of its design capacity of 1,000 megawatts and would then be joined to the national grid by the end of Ramadan, August 30. He said full production of 1,000 megawatts would be reached in late November or early December.
That would be one year after the plant was first turned on in November 2010, when officials said it would take about six months to reach full power.
Meanwhile, there has been no reaction, either positive or negative, to the news reports of last week quoting Majlis Deputy Asghar Jalalian as saying Russia was demanding more money for building the plant.