TVA did not say why Bajestani was fired Friday. TVA Communications Vice President David Mould would only say the dismissal “was not related to his work on the Watts Bar project.”
Bajestani had been involved in a long and messy divorce from his second wife. During the trial it emerged that he had sent $600,000 to Iran after he was served with divorce papers for the purpose of investing the money there. That would violate the US sanctions on Iran.
But Bajestani told the trial court the money had not been invested and remained in the hands of an in-law in Iran. There was no indication of any charges of sanctions violations against Bajestani. Bajestani had sent the money to Iran by first sending it to Canada and then having it transferred from there to Iran.
Bajestani came to the United States in 1975, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Virginia Military Institute in 1979 and a master’s in industrial engineering from the University of Toledo. He became an American citizen in 1982, He married another Iranian-American, but that marriage ended in divorce after the couple had three children.
In 2000, he married Maryam Ghorashi, who is also an engineer and is now 42, and they had two children together. In 2008, she sued Bajestani for a divorce, which was granted for “inappropriate marital conduct.”
Watts Bar is a $2.5 billion project that is two years from completion. “The project is going extremely well and is on time and on budget,” Mould said.
Bajestani previously helped direct the restart and rebuilding of TVA’s Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Athens, Alabama. He was appointed in 2007 to direct the completion of the unfinished Unit 2 reactor at Watts Bar.
TVA began building the Unit 2 reactor at Watts Bar in 1974 but suspended work in 1985 until the project was revived in 2007. The unit is scheduled to be the first new commercial reactor completed in the United States in the 21st Century.
Bajestani earned $619,000 in income and bonuses, according to testimony in his divorce proceedings last year.
The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of the first New Deal agencies created under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to bring electric power to one of the most depressed areas of the United States. TVA now operates 29 hydroelectric power plants and Watts Bars Unit #2 will be its seventh nuclear power plant.
Watts Bar will produce 1,180 megawatts of electricity, making it slightly larger than the 1,000-megawatt plant nearing completion at Bushehr in Iran.
Just like Watts Bar, construction of the Bushehr plant was started years ago and then halted. The time to completion for Watts Bar after construction was resumed is slated for five years, while Bushehr has just passed 16 years.
