The firs shipment of Russian nuclear fuel has reached Iran’s Bushehr power plant, thus giving Tehran the possibility to begin the building of the first reactor in 2008.

Both U.S. and Russian high-ranking officials underlined that this shipment will give Iran no further reason to continue its uranium enrichment program that could lead to the manufacturing of a nuclear weapon.

Nevertheless, Iran announced its intentions to continue the uranium enrichment program at another facility, in the central city of Natanz, to provide fuel for another nuclear reactor. Further more, Tehran suggested that construction had begun on just such a reactor, in Darkhovin in southwestern Iran.

"We are currently constructing a 360-megawatt nuclear power plant in Darkhovin," Vice President Gholam Reza Aghazadeh said in an interview broadcasted by the state television.

Previous official statements regarding this matter have always described the Darkhovin power plant as being in the planning stages.

Aghazadeh added that installing 50,000 centrifuges in Natanz, an industrial-scale enrichment plant, in order to produce the fuel needed for Darkhovin will take several more years.

Although it initially opposed Russian in its initiative to supply Iran with nuclear fuel, the United States have changed its position and now publicly supported the providing of uranium fuel as Moscow retrieves the used reactor fuel for reprocessing, as stipulated in an agreement between Russia and Iran.

"If that's the case — if the Russians are willing to do that, which I support — then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich," Bush said in Fredricksburg, Va.

"If the Iranians accept that uranium for civilian nuclear power, then there's no need for them to learn how to enrich," the president added.

Nevertheless, Bush still believes that Iran is a threat. "Iran's a danger to peace," said Bush, despite the recent U.S. intelligence investigations that found Iran ended a nuclear weapons program in 2003.

"My attitude hasn't changed toward Iran," he said. "If somebody had a weapons program, what's to say they couldn't start it up tomorrow?"