Russia continues to accept foreign nuclear waste for storage

Moscow, July 14 (RIA Novosti) - About 900 kilograms of spent nuclear fuel from six countries are currently stored at sites across Russia, a senior figure in the country's nuclear industry said Thursday.

Addressing an international conference, Multilateral Approaches to the Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Non-Proliferation Issues, Alexei Lebedev, deputy chief executive of Techsnabexport, said the nuclear waste had come from Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Libya, Latvia and Uzbekistan.

Lebedev, whose company exports goods and services produced by enterprises under the Federal Agency for Nuclear Power, added that bringing spent nuclear fuel into Russia for storage was only possible under "the appropriate agreements."

He said that in the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union had a number of research nuclear reactors built in other countries as a way of achieving political influence, so now there were more than 29,700 spent fuel rods left over from the communist era, most of them in eastern Europe.

More than 200 spent fuel rods will be brought into Russia from research reactors in Uzbekistan in the near future, Lebedev said. He also reported that a program had just been drawn up on the transit transportation of nuclear waste into Russia via Kazakhstan.