Russian enriched uranium "works for" the USA

Russia plays an appreciable role on the nuclear fuel market in the United States, said Minister of Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation Alexander Rumyantsev.

"Fifty percent of enriched uranium for the needs of atomic energy in the USA are produced in and delivered from Russia," said Rumyantsev who gave a news conference in Washington.

According to the Russian minister, Russia delivers uranium to the United States under the bilateral Russian-American agreement on the use of highly enriched uranium extracted from nuclear weapons. Signed in 1993, the Agreement will be valid till 2013, and within its framework Russia annually supplies the United States with "uranium of an energetic quality" to the sum of $450 mln.

Russian-American cooperation in the nuclear sphere also includes a number of other promising trends. One of them is the deliveries to the USA of highly radioactive plutonium-38 which will be used by the American space industry for the creation of energy installations and batteries necessary for research stations and probes in super-range orbits or outside the solar system, said the Russian Minister of Atomic Energy.

Alexander Rumyantsev has arrived in the United States for a four-day working visit. He will conduct negotiations with US Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, take part in the work of the first international exhibition of promising technologies from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan which will open on Wednesday in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) and will also address the session of the First Committee of the UN General Assembly in New York.