Iran Plans To Build Small, Indigenous Nuclear Plant
A construction ceremony took place Saturday for the long-promised Darkhovin nuclear power plant, around 70km south of Ahvaz, provincial capital of Khuzestan.
A construction ceremony took place Saturday for the long-promised Darkhovin nuclear power plant, around 70km south of Ahvaz, provincial capital of Khuzestan.
Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran (AEOI) and a vice-president, told journalists the project, known also as the ‘Kanun’ plant due to its proximity to the river, was “important and necessary” for the south west of Iran. He said work was beginning with preparing the site for construction of a 300-megawatt (MW) plant.
Plans for Darkhovin go back to days before the 1979 Revolution, when Shah Reza Pahlavi agreed with France the construction of two 910-MW reactors on the site. In 1992 then president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on a visit to Beijing agreed a plan with China, against United States objections, to sell two 300-MW reactors for Darkhovin, but the Chinese subsequently withdrew, apparently due to continuing pressure from Washington.
Iran did sign up Zurich-based ABB as a consultant, but the Swiss-Swedish robotics and power multinational withdrew more than once before finally quitting in 2018 as the US introduced ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions threatening punitive action against any entity having banking dealings with Iran.
Eslami, making an oblique reference to the apparent failings of “foreigners,” said Saturday Iran would itself construct the $2-billion plant, using a pressurized water reactor (PWR), over eight years on 59 hectares, as part of a wider plan to build “local” plants to power Iran’s industries.
It is not clear if Iran has the technology to independently complete a nuclear reactor. It took Russia decades to finish the Bushehr reactor and Iran was completely dependent on Moscow.
The $2 billion price tag might also be too high and not make sense in comparison to building green renewable sources. For example, Saudi Arabia’s ambitious green energy projects are expected to cost a total of $10 billion with both solar and wind power by 2026 that can provide 50 percent of its electricity needs.
The 300 megawatt that the $2 billion project promises to provide is a tiny contribution to Iran’s ever-increasing consumption of nearly 70,000 megawatts.
The reactor itself has been billed as the country’s first one to be indigenously designed and built. In line with the stress on ‘self-reliance’ beloved of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the AEOI chief stressed the role of Iranian companies in manufacturing the plant’s equipment, including cooling pumps.
Russia has long been in talks with Tehran over new units for Iran’s sole nuclear power station at Bushehr, southern Iran, which began operating in 2011 but has had a checkered performance, producing only 1.25 percent of the country’s electricity in 2021-22. Iran’s stated aim is to produce 10,000 MW of electricity from atomic plants, which if attained would be around a third of the current output today from nuclear power in Japan and roughly equivalent to that of the United Kingdom.
While PWRs are the most common nuclear power plants across the world, any atomic work by Iran is deemed suspicious by the United States, which has twice this year sponsored resolutions critical of Iran at the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations agency tasked with verifying the peaceful nature of nuclear programs.
During an interview with Foreign Policy’s podcast Playlist released on Wednesday, Malley said that the US and Iran came very close to reaching an agreement to revive the 2015 nuclear deal – or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- many times in the past two years, the latest of which was in August, but each time Iran stepped back and came up with new demands that often had nothing to do with the nuclear talks.
“We'll have the sanctions, pressure and diplomacy. If none of that works, the President has said, and, as a last resort, he will agree to a military option because if that’s what it takes to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, that’s what will happen. But we’re not there," he said.
Defending the Biden administration’s efforts to keep diplomacy as an option and criticizing the Trump administration for its maximum-pressure campaign, he said, “We owe it to ourselves to have an honest examination of how sanctions work and how they don’t work.”
The Iranian system as a whole is divided, and not yet concluded whether they really want to come back to the deal, and so each time Tehran was presented with a deal, even about the deals that were considered fair by other parties such as Russia and China, Iran was the one that walked back.
“Iran has rejected countless opportunities to come back to the deal... We are prepared for a world with the JCPOA and without the JCPOA. We’ve continued to put pressure on Iran... We made sure there are sanctions for their support for terrorism, their human rights violations, for their ballistic missile program and for their nuclear program,” he added. “The JCPOA is not on the agenda because of Iran’s position, and we’re continuing with our policy to respond to all of Iran’s destabilizing activities.”
Malley also said reviving the deal would be dead when the non-proliferation benefits of the deal do not justify or warrant the sanctions relief that the US is ready to offer, emphasizing that the US focus and energy are not on the deal. Currently, the focus is on what is happening in Iran and its support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
He also talked about many troubling issues emanating from Iran, saying the US supports aspirations of the Iranian people to achieve the fundamental rights and freedoms that all peoples across the globe should enjoy. “We are mobilizing international attention, putting the spotlight on what’s happening in Iran. It’s very important that the world know at a time when the Iranian regime is trying to hide what’s happening and to distort what’s happening,” he said.
The administration has also put the spotlight on developments in Iran by sanctioning those up and down the chain who are violating the basic rights of the Iranian people, “whether it’s a top leadership or whether it’s an anonymous person in a prison,” Malley noted. “The world should know who is behind that repression.”
He also said Washington is pushing for measures against the Islamic Republic in international bodies, mentioning the resolution at the UN Human Rights Council and the move to kick out Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “It’s an aberration, a complete anomaly, that Iran would be on the commission that is supposed to defend the rights of women when they are repressing them,” he added.
The US will continue to voice its support for the Iranians who are protesting for their rights, he reiterated, saying that “it's an extraordinary page in Iran’s history that’s being written right now.”
Praising “the courage, the determination, the persistence and the creativity of Iranians, particularly women and girls,” Malley said “we’re not going to be the authors; we can be there to express support for the fundamental rights of Iranians. This page will be written by Iranians themselves. It won’t be written in Washington, in London or anywhere around the globe other than Iran.”
Also on Wednesday, The US secretary of state says that the Islamic Republic has a deeply incorrect understanding of its people and is trying to blame others for the current protests.