US grants waivers from anti-Iranian sanctions for Bushehr NPP

The United States has granted waivers to continue three nonproliferation projects in Iran, among them is the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a briefing for foreign reporters on Monday answering a TASS question.

"What we have authorized is very narrow, very limited, very time-limited as well, but important nonetheless that these non-proliferation projects are not things that are taking place without some ability to see what's going on," he said.

"It's a pretty complicated area, the non-proliferation issue. There are three. Bushehr is one of the three," Pompeo said.

The two other projects are supposedly Arak and Fordow facilities. The Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant was set up with the help of Russia, which supplies the NPP with nuclear fuel.

As Pompeo has promised, the US would release detailed information concerning the three nonproliferation facilities later on.

"But if I may, we will get out a full fact sheet on that here in the next hour or so that you will all be able to see," he said.

In 2015, Iran and six international mediators (five permanent UN members - Russia, the United Kingdom, China, the United States, France - and Germany) clinched a deal known as the Iran nuclear deal or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Under the JCPOA, Tehran is to redesign a heavy-water nuclear facility in Arak so the reactor would support peaceful nuclear research. Under the deal, Iran dismantled the core of that reactor. The parameters of Arak reconstruction should be worked out along with China.

In the meantime, two cascades of centrifuges at the Fordow uranium enrichment facility have been modified to produce stable isotopes for industrial and medical purposes.

On May 8, 2018, US President Donald Trump said that Washington was quitting the Iran nuclear deal, which limited Iran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council as well as of those imposed unilaterally by the United States and the European Union. Trump vowed not to just re-impose previous sanctions, but to weigh new ones on Iran. The US Department of State said Washington was aiming to reduce Iran’s oil revenues to zero.