TEHRAN, 16 April 2007 — US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not be welcome to visit Iran given the current state of relations between Tehran and Washington, a top Iranian lawmaker said yesterday.
This statement came soon after Iran had asked for bids to build two new nuclear power stations alongside a still unfinished facility in the south of the country, despite increasing Western pressure over its atomic drive.
Alaeddin Borujerdi told the state IRNA news agency that, “In the light of the stance of the US government against Iran, there is no reason for one of its officials traveling to Iran and (us) talking to America.”
“An official’s visit makes no sense at a time when a country (United States) has attacked an Iranian mission, kidnapped and detained its diplomats,” said Borujerdi, who heads the Parliament’s national security commission. He was referring to five men seized by US forces at Iran’s liaison office in the Iraqi city of Arbil in January.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry said yesterday it would examine a request for a visit to the Islamic republic by Pelosi if Tehran received such an approach. “If there is a request we will examine it,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said, responding to how Iran would react if Pelosi asked for talks with Iranian officials.
Earlier, Iran opened up the process for bids to build two new nuclear power stations. “Iran is launching two tenders for the construction of two nuclear power stations of between 1,000 and 1,600 megawatts capacity in Bushehr,” the director of production of nuclear energy, Ahmad Fayaz Bakhsh, told reporters.
The southern city of Bushehr is the location of Iran’s first nuclear power plant, which is being built by a Russian contractor. However its completion, due for this year, has been held up by a string of delays. Fayaz Bakhsh said Iran’s atomic energy agency would hand over the tender offer documents yesterday for publication in the press in the next days. The tender literature put the closing date for bids at August 8.
“There are already contacts with Russian and European firms. It is expected that construction would take between nine and 11 years,” he said. The cost of the new power plants, which will be built alongside the existing facility in Bushehr, will be between $1.4 billion and $1.7 billion, he said.
The announcement of the tenders shows that Iran has no intention of surrendering its nuclear drive despite being slapped with two sets of UN sanctions over its refusal to halt sensitive atomic activities.
The plan for the first Bushehr plant envisages that Russia will deliver the nuclear fuel itself but the consignment has yet to arrive and Iran has said it wants to be self-sufficient in fuel production.
“Fuel would be produced through local and foreign production. As part of the 20-year economic plan, Iran intends to produce the fuel for two power stations,” Fayaz Bakhsh said.
However foreign observers have raised questions about Iran’s announcement that it can now enrich uranium on an industrial scale, pointing to a lack of information about how many uranium-enriching centrifuges it has installed.
