Magnitude 5 earthquake may have damaged Iran’s active nuclear site
(Worthy News) – Shockwaves from a magnitude 5 earthquake that occurred 30 miles away from Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor may have struck the site Friday, though no reports of damage had yet surfaced.
The reactor, in the southwest of the country on the Gulf coast, is Iran’s only known active nuclear site, and was built by German companies under the oversight of the Russian Ministry for Atomic Energy in 1975.
The US Geological Survey recorded the quake at a depth of 23 miles, but its effects will likely be much less consequential than a 7.3-magnitude tremor in 2017 that killed 620 people and a 2003 quake that killed 31,000 Iranians.
Russia and Iran signed a pact in 2014 agreeing to jointly set up two additional 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactors at Bushehr and possibly six more across the country following that, Russia having recently refused to reapply an Iran weapons embargo in recent days.