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Bushehr, Iran (AHN) – After years of delays and postponement, Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr is now operational and will be supplying electricity to the whole of Iran.

Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s atomic energy chief, announced Saturday that the reactor was fueled and operational.

He added that all that is needed is to wait for the water in the reactor to heat up gradually and for further tests to be conducted before electricity could be supplied to Iran’s national electric grid in a month or two.

Construction on the reactor was initiated in the 1970s by Kraftwerk Union, a branch of the German company Siemens, but was halted and the contract rescinded by the Islamic revolution in 1979 and by the Iran-Iraq war.

Russians completed the reactor and were supposed to operate it in 1999 but were interrupted several times by mounting technological and financial challenges as well as by U.S. pressure.

In 2005, Russia agreed to instead supply Iran with nuclear power and take back all spent reactor fuel to enable the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the plant and assure that the nuclear waste wouldn’t be diverted elsewhere.

The first batch of nuclear fuel was delivered by Russia in 2007. It remains to be seen how the spent nuclear waste will be disposed of, or how operators might deal with the possible threat of a new computer virus attack similar to the sophisticated Stuxnet worm that was widely believed to have stalled the Iranian nuclear plant in recent months.

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