Three Russian designers of Iran's nuclear plant die in plane crash DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
June 23, 2011
Three Russian scients who built BushehrThe three Russian nuclear scientists who planned, designed, built and put into operation Iran's first nuclear
reactor at Bushehr this year, died Tuesday night, June 20, when a Rusaero flight from Moscow to Petrozavodsk
in northwest Russia crashed.
debkafile's sources reveal that they were among the 44 passengers who were killed.
Their loss is
a severe blow to Russia's atomic reactor industry as well as its nuclear program as a whole,
since the three, Sergey Ryzhov, Gennady Banuyk and Nikolay Trunov, specialized in running installations in
tandem and synchronizing various systems.
The Russian company OKB Gidropress, Moscow, which employed them as chief planners of nuclear plants,
is proud of having sold reactors to five countries including Iran.
The authorities have
ordered an investigation to find out why all three senior nuclear scientists were aboard
the same airliner in violation of Russian security regulations which prohibit more than one high-ranking politician,
military figure or executive of a sensitive industry taking the same flight.
The cause of the Tu-134's crash is also being probed - although it has a notoriously high accident rate and
should not have been used by the three scientists. The eight passengers who survived, who are in critical
condition, are to be quizzed to find out what happened aboard the plane before it crashed.
The first assumption was that the disaster occurred due to human error.
The three pilots missed the
runway while landing at Petrozavodsk's Nikolay Trunov airport because of heavy fog. It caught fire next
to a highway.
This was the worst Russian aviation disaster since April 10, 2010, when a plane carrying the Polish
president, his wife and many other
Polish dignitaries crashed in similar circumstances near the
city of Smolensk killing 97 people.
Our sources report that Iran chose to buy its first reactor from OKB Gidropress because the Russian
firm bills itself as designers, builders, planners and operators of nuclear plants, specializing in adapting
them to existing nuclear systems. For Tehran this capability was critical because the Bushehr reactor is
composed of systems made in different countries, particularly Germany, and experts were needed for
synchronizing them into a smoothly functioning plant.
debkafile's intelligence sources quote Iranian and Western intelligence officials as offering the opinion that
the Bushehr reactor's mixed components made it vulnerable to the Stuxnet malworm's invasion of its control
system two years ago. The three Russian scientists spent February and March 2011 at Bushehr after the
Russian Nuclear Energy Commission insisted that the nuclear fuel rods be removed until they were sure the
plant would not explode. The rods have since been reloaded and the reactor went online last month.
Wednesday, June 22, the OKB Gidropress Company Web site ran a black-bordered obituary mourning the
deaths of Sergey Ryzhov, 52, Director General designer at OKB Gidropress, Gennady Banuyk, 65, Deputy
Director and Chief Designer and Nikolay Trunov, 52, Chief Designer-Head of Division.
