VIENNA, Feb 28, (Agencies): Iran is believed to have told the UN atomic watchdog a broken pump is forcing it to remove fuel from its first nuclear reactor, in a fresh setback for the $1 billion project, experts familiar with the issue said on Monday.
They said it was a potentially serious problem that could cause months of further delays for the Russian-built Bushehr plant, which has yet to start injecting power into Iran’s national grid.
Iran has said Bushehr, first in a planned network of nuclear power plants, would start producing electricity early this year.
It says the plant is proof of the peaceful nature of its nuclear programme and that its uranium enrichment work is only meant to produce reactor fuel, rejecting Western accusations the Islamic Republic may be seeking to develop atomic bombs. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a report obtained by Reuters on Friday that Iran had told it Iranian experts would remove fuel assemblies from the core of the Bushehr reactor, just a few months after they were loaded.
The confidential IAEA document did not give a reason for the unusual action, which is expected to take place soon.

One independent expert said the problem apparently concerned an old back-up pump in the reactor.
“I think what happened is that the pump failed but it didn’t just fail, it broke up, so that ... there are pieces of metal that are now circulated throughout the primary cooling system,” the expert told Reuters.
If not fixed, it could ultimately have led to a small radioactive leakage into the reactor’s cooling water.
“They are probably very happy it happened before it went critical (the plant starting to operate) because now they can inspect the fuel a lot more easily,” the expert, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue, added. Bushehr was begun by Germany’s Siemens in the 1970s, before Iran’s Islamic revolution and has been dogged by delays. Fuel was loaded into the reactor four months ago but a January deadline for it to start producing electricity was missed.
Further woes could be an embarrassment not only to Iranian politicians who have made Bushehr the show-piece of Tehran’s peaceful nuclear ambitions, but also for Russia which would like to export more of its nuclear know-how to emerging economies.
Mark Hibbs, a senior associate in the Nuclear Policy Programme of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that if it was a broken pump that was the problem, small bits of metal in the cooling water could damage the fuel rods.

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TEHRAN: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday that it was weapons manufactured and delivered to “dictators” by the United States that were killing protesters in uprisings around the Arab world.
The hardliner said that the United States and its allies must be blamed for imposing dictatorships on regional countries now in the grip of deadly revolts.
These “dictators who are killing their own people are incapable of manufacturing even simple things and they are killing their people with weapons they bought from America and its allies,” the Fars news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
“The American government and its allies should be held accountable for imposing dictatorship on these nations in the past 30 to 40 years... and they (Western officials) are now claiming that they are supporters of people and democracy.”
Iranian officials have expressed support for the wave of protests that began in Tunisia and Egypt and have spread around the region, now threatening longstanding regimes in Libya, Yemen and Bahrain.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the events as an “Islamic awakening.”