TEHRAN, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Energy Minister Parviz Fattah said Monday that Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant will start to generate electricity from mid-summer, the official IRNA news agency reported.

    "Bushehr nuclear power plant will generate 500 megawatt electricity from mid-summer," Fattah was quoted as saying.

    The operation of the Bushehr nuclear power plant had been Iranians' old dream, he added.

    The country's 1,000-megawatt nuclear power plant originally started in the mid-1970s by Siemens of Germany but was abandoned with the outbreak of the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution.

    Iran and Russia, after reaching an agreement on nuclear cooperation in 1992, signed a contract in January 1995 to finish the construction of the plant, the completion of which has been repeatedly delayed.