Fuel rods removed from Bushehr nuclear reactor
Iran’s nuclear reactor at Bushehr was shut down in mid-October for fear of an explosion. Saturday Dec. 1, an authoritative Russian nuclear industry source revealed the cause of its malfunction: “Indicators showed that some small external parts were… in the [Bushehr] reactor vessel….” They were identified as “bolts beneath the fuel cells.”
DEBKAfile’s Moscow sources report this information came from a source in the office of Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the Russian nuclear energy authority Rosatom, which supervised the construction of Iran’s first atomic reactor at Bushehr.
According to our intelligence sources, Russian scientists and engineers were rushed from Moscow to Bushehr when Russian leaders including Vladimir Putin were warned that the danger of an explosion at Bushehr was high. Neither Moscow nor Tehran reported what was happening. Now they are racing against the clock to get the reactor back on stream.
Russian experts estimated that an explosion at the Bushehr reactor had the potential for causing a million Iranian deaths and hundreds of thousands of radiation victims in the Persian Gulf emirates, which supply the world with one-fifth of its fuel. The hazard was so great in October that Putin ordered command teams of the Russian emergency ministry trained to deal with nuclear disasters to set out for Bushehr in southern Iran and prepare the infrastructure for larger teams.
The engineers immediately shut down the reactor and removed its 163 fuel rods. The bolts which had turned up in the reactor vessel were examined to find out from which part of the plant they had come loose – from the fuel rods – which would have embarrassed Russia as their supplier – or some other part of the reactor. The Russian source which revealed the mishap made a point of saying that the bolts were “small external parts,” indicating that they were not from the rods.
Our intelligence sources in Moscow report that two possible outside causes of the malfunction are under scrutiny by Moscow and Tehran:
