August 22, 2010
IRAN FUELS FIRST NUCLEAR PLANT
Iranian and Russian engineers – according to the Associated Press -- began loading fuel Saturday into Iran’s first nuclear power plant at Bushehr.
Moscow has promised to safeguard material at the site from being used in any potential weapons production.
After years of delays, fueling of the Bushehr plant in southern Iran marks the start up of a facility for energy production that the United States of America once hoped to block as a way to separate nuclear activities of far-greater concern.
There have not been strong objections to the Bushehr plant itself, as there have been with Iran’s separate efforts at other sites to accelerate uranium enrichment. The latter is a process that makes the fuel for power plants but which can be used also in weapons production.
DEFIANT SYMBOL
Even as Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said the plant demonstrated the country has only peaceful aims, he celebrated it with reporters in the plant as a defiant “symbol of Iranian resistance and patience” in the face of Western pressure.
He continued:
“Despite all pressure, sanctions, and hardships imposed by Western nations -- we are now witnessing the start up of the largest symbol of Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities.”
Washington and other nations do not oppose Iran’s stated aim of producing nuclear energy. However, they are concerned that if Iran masters the enrichment cycle, the nation would have a pathway to weapons production -- under the convenient cover of a peaceful energy program.
Iran denies such ambition.
RUSSIAN PLEDGE
Russia – which helped finish building Bushehr – has pledged to prevent spent nuclear fuel at the site from being shifted to a possible weapons program.
After years of delaying its completion, Moscow says it believes the Bushehr project is essential for persuading Iran to cooperate with international efforts to ensure Iran does not develop the bomb.
The United States – while no longer formally objecting to the plant--disagrees and says Iran should not be rewarded while it continues to defy United Nations demands to halt uranium enrichment.
FIRST LOAD
On Saturday, the first truckload of fuel was taken from a storage site -- to a fuel “pool” inside the reactor building -- under the watch of monitors from the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
Over the next two weeks, 163 fuel assemblies (equal to 80 tons of uranium fuel) will be moved inside the building, and then into the reactor core.
OUR VIEW
Iran has been deceitful to its neighbors – and the United States of America -- ever since November 4, 1979. At that time, communist-leaning clerics and college students stormed the U.S. consulate at Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage there until the election of President Ronald Reagan on January 20, 1981.
The Iran tiger has not changed its stripes as of today. Iran is still ultra-socialist, but a strong, capitalist-populist citizenry survives.
Speak softly but carry a big stick.
Speak when you’re angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
A never failing way to get rid of a feller is to tell him something for his own good.
---- Ken Hubbard
Nothing is easier up, and harder to drop, than a prejudice.
No man has ever been shot while washing the dishes.
By Lindsey Wilger Williams, retired newspaper publisher and syndicated columnist
