Daily Press Briefing by State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack on the State of Iran's Bushehr Project (Excerpts)

September 8, 2008

Weapon Program: 

  • Nuclear

. . .

QUESTION: Yeah, on another topic, there's a report in TASS that the president of the general - Russian general contractor for the Bushehr project in Iran has said it's about to get to a kind of point of no return. And he says that the site will soon be at a state where - where the launch of the nuclear power plant is irreversible. Is there any comment on that?

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, we've talked previously about Bushehr and the Russians have an agreement with Iran regarding the construction of Bushehr and providing fuel for Bushehr, and key to that agreement - and that was an agreement that was applauded by members of the Security Council, of the international community, is a fuel take-back provision, so that Iran - in a sense, it is a kind of model for Iran being able to have civilian nuclear energy without the fuel cycle, which is the concern of the international system, that Iran not be allowed to possess the know how and the technologies that would - of the fuel cycle.

Because quite frankly, the international system has, at this point, decided they can't be trusted with it. So Bushehr, in that sense, is a potential model for going forward so that Iran can have peaceful nuclear energy and not have access to the fuel cycle.

 

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