TEHRAN: Iran can "easily" help Japan in dealing with a crippled nuclear power plant which was damaged in the aftermath of a March 11 tsunami, a top Iranian atomic scientist was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"Iran is one of the nations which under the current circumstances can help Japan with the damage in the Fukushima (Daiichi) nuclear plant," Mahmoud Reza Aghamiri, Iran's newly appointed representative to the Middle East's SESAME nuclear project, was quoted as saying by the Fars news agency.
"Iranian experts can easily tackle this disaster and solve Japan's problem. This shows that maybe Iran's practical capabilities are higher than Japan's," he said, charging that Japanese nuclear technology depended on the United States.
The quake and tsunami in March left reactor cores in Fukushima heating up uncontrollably, resulting in the world's worst nuclear emergency since Chernobyl 25 years ago. As a result, some highly radioactive water has leaked into both the ocean and the atmosphere.
Iran too lies in an area of major seismic activity and is prone to frequent earthquakes.
Aghamiri was appointed Iran's representative to SESAME in March after his predecessor Masoud Ali Mohammadi was killed in a bomb attack in January last year.
Iran blamed the killing on "mercenaries" paid by the Islamic republic's arch-foes Israel and the United States.
Aghamiri's comments came as Iran awaits the first power generation from a nuclear plant which it has been building for more than a decade with Russian assistance in the southern port city of Bushehr.
The linking of the plant to the national grid has been repeatedly delayed.
The SESAME project, or Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications for the Middle East, is a regional organisation for scientific cooperation.
It aims to establish a particle accelerator in Jordan comparable to that of the Geneva-based CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
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