EMEA News
Iran Re-floats Nuclear-Powered Ship Plans
Fereidoun Abbasi, Head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), has said the country would consider enriching uranium to 45 to 56 percent to power ships and submarines, the Iran's FARS News Agency (FNA) reported this week.
However, at the moment Iran has "no enrichment plan for purity levels above 20 percent," Abbasi added.
The Islamic Republic is currently subject to a multitude of sanctions from the West who believe the country is enriching uranium to make nuclear weapons, something Iran has repeatedly denied.
The country originally raised the idea of nuclear-powered merchant ships in July last year, with member of the parliament's Industries Commission Allahverdi Dehqani saying at the time that the need could arise as a result of the very sanctions aimed at curbing the country's nuclear development.
"Given the western states' sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which include an embargo on the supply of fossil fuels to Iranian vessels, the Islamic Republic will replace the fossil fuel with nuclear fuel to counter the sanctions so that Iranian ships would not need refueling for long-distance voyages," he said.
While nuclear-powered vessels are not a new concept, the technological and political complexities of building and operating such vessels have limited the number of non-military examples.
Past example include the Russian barge carrier Sevmorput, the U.S.-built NS Savannah, Japan's Mutsu, and the German built Otto Hahn, while Russia currently oversees a fleet of nuclear icebreakers and has plans to build the world's biggest by 2017, the BBC reported last year.
