BAKU, Azerbaijan, November 2. Eight nuclear power plants will be constructed in the southern and northern parts of Iran, said Iranian Vice President and Head of the Atomic Energy Organization Mohammad Eslami during a meeting between President Masoud Pezeshkian and nuclear industry officials, Trend reports.
He stated that a contract has been signed with Russia for the construction of these nuclear power plants. Four of them will be built in the southern province of Bushehr, while the remaining four will be located in the northern part of the country.
Eslami noted that the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, currently Iran’s only operational facility of its kind, was commissioned in 2003. Under the approved program, the construction of new plants in different regions will help meet the country’s growing electricity demand.
The vice president also mentioned that in Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan province, construction of the Darkhovin Nuclear Power Plant began before the Islamic Revolution (1979). In recent years, local experts have resumed work on the project.
Eslami added that another site has been selected on the Caspian Sea coast, in Golestan province in northern Iran, for the construction of a new nuclear power plant.
“By building nuclear power plants in various parts of the country, we aim to increase Iran’s nuclear electricity generation capacity to 20,000 megawatts,” he said.
The organization’s head emphasized that construction of the second and third units of the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant continued even during the 12 days of military airstrikes against Iran. The work is still ongoing.
The first unit of the Bushehr plant began operating in 2011. In 2013, its operation was handed over from the Russian Atomic Company to an Iranian company. Since then, the unit has produced a maximum output of 1,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. Over the past decade, total electricity generation at the Bushehr plant has exceeded 65 billion kilowatt-hours.
Additionally, construction of the second and third units of the Bushehr plant began in 2017 on a 50-hectare site. Each unit will have the capacity to generate 1,057 megawatts of electricity once operational. Their commissioning is expected to save around 10 million barrels of crude oil or 1.6 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually, while preventing the emission of 7 million tons of pollutants into the environment.