Russia has withdrawn almost all its staff from Iran’s sole nuclear power plant, the head of Russia’s atomic energy agency said Monday.
“We began the final rotation at the Bushehr station,” Alexei Likhachev said, adding that 108 people were evacuated while just 20 – top managers and those responsible for equipment safety – remained at the station.
Russia began evacuating its staff from the plant due to the threat of airstrikes amid the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Moscow has warned that attacks near the plant risked a “radiological disaster more devastating than Chernobyl.”
The Bushehr facility is located in the south of Iran and equipped with a 1,000-megawatt reactor.
The area around it has been struck at least four times during the war.
Earlier this month, an attack saw one person – a guard at the facility – killed, but did not damage the plant itself, according to Iranian state media and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s analysis of satellite imagery of the site.
