Iran’s complacency with regard to their new nuclear power plant is a bit odd (this is the entire article):
Iran’s nuclear aspirations may not end with a bang or even a whimper. Instead, their demise may be due to a stack of unpaid invoices. By the end of May, the Iranian government owed Russia’s RosAtom more than $100 million for work done on the Bushehr nuclear power plant. And the Iranians have no apparent desire to pay their bills. In late May, a RosAtom official said that “it seems that the Iranians have lost interest” in the Bushehr plant, continuing that the “project has become unprofitable for us.”
There have been ongoing squabbles over payment. Under the contract terms, Iran is supposed to pay RosAtom about $25 million a month. In late 2006 after months of non-payment, Iran resumed payments and assured that it would stay current. RosAtom resumed construction at Bushehr, sending 2,000 Russian workers on-site. But the money problems continue. Sergey Kirilenko, the head of RosAtom, has said that the Bushehr plant could be finished within a few months, provided that Iran pays its bills.
I see three possible scenarios: 1) Iran doesn’t have the cash (unlikely – $100 million is nothing); 2) Iran wants to use the plant as a bargaining chip and has no interest in dumping more money into something they’re just going to trade away; or 3) Iran never wanted a nuclear power plant – it wanted nuclear technology, which it has now acquired.
I sure hope I’m missing something.
