WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2005
Russia to join US led Uranium FB
AFP
VIENNA: Russia is ready to join the United States in creating a bank of uranium fuel for countries which pledge not to make enriched uranium but wants strict international regulations, the Russian atomic chief said on Wednesday.
"We support this American initiative," Alexander Rumyantsev, who is head of the Russian federal nuclear agency, said in Vienna.
But he said it should be "incorporated in international agreements" since current US-Russian efforts to turn weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) into low-enriched uranium (LEU) were governed under a bilateral, US-Russian political agreement.
The fuel bank should be overseen by the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, Rumyantsev said. He was speaking to reporters at a general conference in Vienna this week of the IAEA's 139 member states.
"The IAEA is the organization that will have to develop the regulations and rules for such a mechanism," he said.
The United States is ready to convert HEU into LEU, which does not have a proliferation risk, and offer it to countries which give up the enrichment process, US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said on tuesday in a statement. Besides the United States, the other countries which produce enriched uranium for commercial use are France, Russia, Japan, Brazil, China and the Netherlands, Germany and Britain in the Urenco consortium.
The blended-down LEU will be "available about 2009." IAEA officials said they had been alerted to the US offer but had not yet studied it.
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