Sputnik- The first tranche of the allocated 300,000 billion rials ($9 billion) for the construction of two power blocks of the Bushehr NPP, built with the Russian assistance, will be transferred for the project within two weeks, according to Ali Akbar Salehi, the president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The Iranian authorities allocated a total of 300,000 billion rials ($9 billion) for the construction of two power blocks of the Bushehr NPP, built with the Russian assistance, Ali Akbar Salehi, the president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said on Saturday.

The first tranche of the allocated sum will be transferred for the project within two weeks, Salehi said, as quoted by the IRNA news agency. He added that the completion of the project would take a decade. Salehi said that AEOI has been engaged in two other projects, namely the nuclear emergency unit and a hospital for heart diseases.

Bushehr is Iran’s first nuclear power plant. The construction started in 1975, but was suspended amid the 1978-1979 Iran's Islamic revolution and the Western sanctions against Tehran, as Germany, responsible for the Bushehr construction, joined the United States in restrictive measures against Tehran.

Iran’s deal with Russia on the first stage of the Bushehr project, Bushehr 1, goes back to 1992. The nuclear power plant with a single 1,000-megawatt light water reactor was connected to the national electric grid in 2011 and reached full capacity the following year.

In September, a ceremony devoted to the start of the construction of a reactor facility destined was held in the Bushehr province. The Russian Experimental Design Bureau (OKB) Gidropress, a subsidiary of the state atomic energy corporation Rosatom, is be responsible for the development of a reactor for the NPP.