TEHRAN, March 16. /ITAR-TASS/. Iranian experts have selected sixteen potential sites for building more nuclear power plants, the news agency FARS said on Sunday.

“In accordance with the feasibility studies a total of sixteen sites have been identified. Ten of them are in the coastal areas of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, in the South of the country,” the deputy director of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Ahmadian, said. “These territories are very good building nuclear power plants.”

Ahmadian recalled a parliamentary resolution to the effect the Iranian atomic energy agency was expected to create conditions for building nuclear power plants capable of generating more than 20,000 megawatts of electricity. For that reason the “organization had begun planning the construction of a large number of power plants.”

The Iranian authorities have repeatedly said that the country would need enough power plants to generate 20,000 megawatts of electricity by 2020.