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Iran said Sunday it would seek bids in the next few days for two new nuclear power plants and will partly run them on fuel produced at home, a process the West fears could lead to material for building atomic bombs.

Ahmad Fayazbakhsh, an official at Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, said the power plants would each have capacity for 1,000 to 1,600 MW and would be built at Bushehr, the southwest port city where Russians are building Iran's first atomic plant.

The West fears Iran's civilian nuclear program is a smokescreen for atomic weapon ambitions, a charge Teheran denies.

A Western diplomat said the tender announcement appeared aimed at justifying Iran's statement last Monday it had expanded work to make atomic fuel in defiance of a UN demand to halt uranium enrichment, a process which can be used to make bombs.

"Two international tenders in the coming days will be issued by Iran's Atomic Energy Organization ... and they (the two plants) will be built at Bushehr," Fayazbakhsh, in charge of the nuclear power reactors at the organization, said.

"Because we have the capability to produce nuclear fuel inside the country, in the long term, part of the fuel for the reactors will be provided by Iran and the rest will be imported," he told a news conference.

Monday's announcement by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the country had begun enrichment on an "industrial scale" drew condemnation from the West. Russia, Iran's closest big power ally, questioned if Teheran had achieved such a scale.

"I rather take it (the statement on power plant tenders) as another act of politics," said the Western diplomat. "They need to prove that their (enrichment) program is peaceful."

Russia is due to supply fuel for the plant it is now building but the first shipment that had been due in March was postponed ostensibly because of row over payment delays. Iran denies missing payments. The plant has taken years to complete.

Iran's refusal to heed UN demands for it to stop enriching uranium has prompted two rounds of sanctions since December.

Despite its claim to have started industrial enrichment, the UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran's atomic fuel work was still in the early stages and said it was running several hundred centrifuges, not the thousands associated with industrial-scale processing.

The more centrifuges Iran operates the quicker it could enrich enough fuel to the high levels needed for a bomb, if that was its aim. But Western experts say Iran is still several years away from building a warhead.

Iran had said it would announce tenders for two new nuclear plants last year. Iran has said it wants to build a network nuclear power plants with a capacity for 20,000 MW by 2020.

(China Daily via agencies April 16, 2007)