Rosatom returns 42 specialists to Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant after mass evacuation

Russia is tiptoeing back into Iran’s most prominent nuclear facility. Rosatom, Moscow’s state-owned nuclear corporation, has sent 42 specialists back to the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant as of mid-August, marking the first significant return of Russian personnel since a sweeping evacuation earlier this year.

The goal is to scale that number to 100 by autumn, assuming the security situation cooperates.

From 600 to zero to 42

In late February, US and Israeli military operations escalated across the region. By April, Rosatom had evacuated more than 600 Russian staff from the Bushehr site as a precautionary measure.

Roughly 700 Russian specialists had been working on the construction of Bushehr’s second and third reactor units, part of a broader workforce of about 3,000 people at the site. Pulling them out meant effectively hitting pause on one of the most consequential nuclear construction projects in the Middle East.

Bushehr’s first unit has been operational since 2011, generating 915 megawatts of electrical capacity. Units 2 and 3 are still under construction. After the evacuation, local Iranian contractors kept work going at a reduced pace, but the absence of Rosatom’s engineers was a clear bottleneck.

Now, with 42 specialists back on-site and a target of 100 by fall, Moscow is signaling that it considers the immediate threat to the facility to have diminished. Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev framed it with characteristic understatement.

“If all goes well, we’ll increase our staff to 100 people this autumn.”

Likhachev also indicated that conditions at the plant are currently calm.

Why Bushehr matters beyond energy

The facility’s history stretches back decades. Construction originally began under a German contract in the 1970s before the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War interrupted progress. Russia stepped in during the 1990s to complete the first reactor, and the project has been a cornerstone of bilateral cooperation ever since.

Before the evacuation, Rosatom had committed significant technical resources to the expansion, with the 700 specialists on-site representing the largest contingent of Russian nuclear workers at any single foreign project. The April pullout wasn’t a political statement, it was a safety decision, but it had political consequences nonetheless.

The security calculus

The military operations that prompted the evacuation began on February 28. Going from more than 600 personnel to 42 is itself a statement about risk tolerance. Rosatom isn’t flooding the zone — it’s running what amounts to a skeleton crew, enough to maintain critical operations and perhaps advance some construction work, but not enough to represent a major exposure if conditions deteriorate again.

The 100-person target for autumn is explicitly conditional. Rosatom learned in April that evacuation logistics for hundreds of workers from a remote coastal site in southern Iran are complex and time-sensitive. Keeping the headcount manageable gives Moscow an easier exit ramp.

Meanwhile, Bushehr’s first unit continues operating at full capacity.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.