Tehran:
Iranian and Russian engineers began loading fuel Saturday into Iran's first nuclear power plant, which Moscow has promised to safeguard to prevent material at the site from being used in any potential weapons production.
After years of delays, the fuelling of the Bushehr plant in southern Iran marks the start-up of a facility for energy production that the US once hoped to block as a way to pressure the country to stop separate nuclear activities of far greater concern.
There have not been strong objections to the Bushehr plant itself as there have been with Iran's separate efforts at other sites to accelerate uranium enrichment, a process that makes the fuel for power plants but which can also be used in weapons production.
Washington and other nations do not oppose Iran's stated aim of producing nuclear energy, but are concerned that if Iran masters the enrichment cycle it would have a pathway to weapons production under the convenient cover of a peaceful energy program. Iran denies such an intention.
It is the enrichment work that has been the target of four rounds of UN Security Council sanctions.
Russia, which helped finish building Bushehr, has pledged to prevent spent nuclear fuel at the site from being shifted to a possible weapons program.
On Saturday, a first truckload of fuel was taken from a storage site to a fuel "pool" inside the reactor building under the watch of monitors from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency.
The head of Russia's state-run nuclear corporation, Sergei Kiriyenko, and Iranian Vice President and nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi were also present.
Over the next two weeks, 163 fuel assemblies, equal to 80 tons of uranium fuel, will be moved inside the building and then into the reactor core.
Workers in white lab coats and helmets led reporters on a tour of the cavernous facility.
It will be another two months before the 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor is pumping electricity to Iranian cities.