With Malice Aforethought

In Iran's rush to modernize and to take advantage of nuclear power under Shah Pahlavi before he was so rudely dethroned, it is understandable that Iran, a then-emerging-into-the-20th-Century nation, would not be aware that it makes no sense whatever to place a nuclear reactor structure on geography vulnerable to shifting tectonic plates. Earthquakes and nuclear plants do not make for a good combination.

But then on the other hand, a more technically advanced country like Japan made the same fatal error in judgement. But Germany and Russia, those two scientifically aware and advanced countries, not knowing any better? The mind boggles.

In any event, in 1975 Germany busied itself helping pre-Revolutionary Iran design and build a nuclear plant close to Bushehr, a city of over a million population in southeast Iran. An area that represents one of the most active seismic regions of the world. Not just two, but three tectonic plates rubbing aggravatingly against one another on the Earth's crust. Is that careless, or what?

Germany abandoned the project, it seems, when the Shah was unseated from his Peacock Throne. And that's when Russia stepped in to provide completion assistance in 1996. So the Bushehr plant comprises a mixed German-Russian technology. The plant began operating in July 2013 when Russia helpfully supplied the nuclear fuel to enable its start-up. The plant represents a 40-year-stale design, with a 30-year-old cooling system.

And as far as the International Atomic Energy Agency is concerned the staff operating the plant which runs on two different technologies has not been adequately trained to cope with any potential accident that might occur. One did surface in February 2011 with a broken water pump infiltrating the reactor cooling system with small metallic pieces, an event that led to the required unloading of the fuel rods.

A general view of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, 1,200 km (746 miles) south of Tehran, August 21, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Raheb Homavandi

But Iran needn't be too concerned over the possibility that the earth will go into one of its regular shake-and-roll syndromes of catastrophic consequences impinging on the Bushehr reactor. The plant wasn't online in April last year when a measly 6.3 magnitude quake hit the area. If shake comes to collapse, in any event, Bushehr is closer to population centres in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar than it is to other populous Iranian cities.

Should Iran become really ticked off at the objections of its Arab neighbours to the possible consequences of a nuclear reactor built too close to their major cities, their own protected by the Zagros Mountain range acting as a shield for Iran, with prevailing winds pushing radioactive materials toward its neighbours, it would have no need to go to war when provoked.

An accident at Bushehr would have consequences for the citizens of Bushehr, but Iran has stated before it can spare a million people - in reference to a nuclear war with Israel - knowing that the less populous state would be hit harder by its own dread losses.

Perhaps the same kind of thinking is being employed by the irascible, Islamist theocracy in regard to its other neighbours not just its Jewish ones.