Iran Announces Bushehr Power Plant Delays Amid Stuxnet Speculation

(Sept. 29) -- Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's atomic energy chief, said today that the country's Bushehr nuclear plant is running two or three months behind schedule and won't be connected to the national grid until January or February.

The announcement is raising eyebrows because of news last week that a mysterious and powerful computer worm -- called Stuxnet -- had infected computers at the atomic plant. Experts say Stuxnet is so sophisticated that only a team of developers supported by a nation state or a very wealthy private group could have created it. That diagnosis has in turn led to speculation that the worm was created specifically to attack Iran's nuclear program.

Iran began loading fuel rods into the Bushehr plant in August. At that time, Ali Shirzadian, a spokesman for the country's atomic agency, said that Bushehr would be connected to the national grid in October or November. Soon after, though, Salehi announced that the fuel rods would be delayed until September, and then September became October. Salehi blamed the delay on the hot weather, saying the rods had to be loaded at night, according to Agence France-Presse.

Now that deadline has been pushed back again. "God willing, the fuel will be loaded to the core of the reactor completely by early November and the heart of Bushehr power plant will start beating by then," Salehi reportedly told the semiofficial ISNA news agency today. "Two to three months after that electricity will be added to the networks."

Delays are not new to Bushehr. Construction began in the 1970s by German company Siemens, but was stopped after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. It was taken up again by Russia in the 1990s. In 2007, then atomic agency chief Reza Aghazadeh promised that the plant would be up and running in 2008.

If and when it finally does go online, Bushehr is expected to produce 1,000 megawatts, or 2.5 percent of the country's power usage. The U.S. and several European countries are wary of Iran's nuclear program, which they believe is clandestinely developing nuclear weapons, a charge Iran denies.

Analysis by security firm Symantec found that that 60 percent of Stuxnet's attacks occurred in Iran. Last week, Iranian officials confirmed reports that Stuxnet had infected 30,000 computers in the country, including personal computers used by staff at Bushehr, but they said the damage had not been significant. Today Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast shrugged off speculation that Bushehr was badly affected, Sky News reports.

Stuxnet is thought to target Siemens' supervisory control and data acquisition systems, which control industrial plants such as power plants. But Forbes blogger Jeffrey Carr pointed out in a column Tuesday that the theories surrounding Stuxnet -- and particularly its alleged targeting of Bushehr -- are entirely speculative and require further investigation. Jumping to conclusions, he warns, could replicate the pattern of the claim that Iraq had WMDs: "Bad analysis combined with a political agenda supported by a non-critical media propelled us into a war that never should have happened."