Rosatom chief: Only 20 staff remain at Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant

Only 20 employees remain at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran following an evacuation prompted by the war between the United States and Israel, head of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom, Alexey Likhachev, said during a briefing in Cairo.

He stressed that the reduced team is maintaining oversight of the site and ensuring the safety and operational integrity of key facilities, Caliber.Az reports, citing Russian media.

“At the site itself, 20 people remain. These are the head of our branch, his deputies, security personnel, and technical engineers, whose tasks are divided into two parts. First, they must ensure the safety of our residential area and the operability of the mechanisms and all construction facilities. This requires constant monitoring and supervision.

It should also be noted that our Iranian partners have also withdrawn engineering workers from the site, leaving only security staff. In coordination with the Iranian client, we must ensure the preservation and, if I may say so, the ‘combat readiness’ of this enormous construction site. At the same time, we must be fully prepared to resume construction.

Our Iranian partners are strongly urging us not to abandon the project, to be ready to bring people back and, more importantly, to expand and continue the work in order to move more intensively toward the implementation of this project. We are setting such a task and are not removing the second and third units of the Bushehr plant from our priorities,” Likhachev said.

Rosatom CEO also added that 108 evacuated employees are expected to cross into Armenia on April 14.

“I very much hope that they will cross the border by night and travel through Yerevan to Moscow, so they can rest from this tension and wait for the results of negotiations and the outcome related to the end of the military conflict, because our work is, of course, peaceful — our task is to build nuclear power units,” he emphasised.