Iran says its engineers trained in Russia are ready to begin work at the country's first nuclear power plant. Nuclear official Ahmad Fayyazbakhsh says about 700 Iranian engineers trained who spent the past four years in Russia are ready to "operate" the plant in the southern port of Bushehr. In a report Tuesday, the official IRNA news agency quotes Fayyazbakhsh as saying the plant would begin working later in the current Iranian calendar year, which ends in March 2009. Iran is still finishing building the 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant and Russia is helping with the construction. Tehran also plans to build a 360-megawatt nuclear power plant in Darkhovin, in the southwestern Khuzestan province. Meanwhile, Iran has shortened the length of its mandatory military service by up to two months, the Fars news agency reported on Tuesday. “The military service has been cut by two months in normal cases and by one month in underprivileged areas,” where the term was 18 months, Brigadier General Moussa Kamali was quoted as saying. “In the areas that (military) operations are being carried out, the term was 17 months... and now it has been cut to 16 months,” added Kamali, who is chief conscription officer of the armed forces. Military service in the Islamic republic lasted 24 months by the end of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war but has since been gradually shortened to less than two years. According to Jane's Military Balance, the number of active armed forces in Iran stood at 545,000 in 2007.
