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France soon to approve funds for Russian nuclear decommissioning

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MOSCOW, February 2 (RIA Novosti) - An agreement with France will be signed within the next two to three weeks under which the country will help fund a program to secure and destroy Soviet-era radioactive materials, a senior official from Russia's nuclear agency said Thursday.

Sergei Antipov, the deputy head of the Federal Agency for Nuclear Power, said: "Within the next two to three weeks, an agreement will be signed with France through the G8 Global Partnership agreement, and also with Norway."

The Global Partnership program was adopted by leaders of the Group of Eight club of rich nations at the 2002 summit in Kananaskis, Canada, and aims to prevent terrorist groups from obtaining weapons and materials of mass destruction.

Russia inherited vast stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons and related dangerous materials from the Soviet Union. Thousands of metric tons of chemical weapons are stored in the country, as well as large stocks of highly enriched uranium and weapon-grade plutonium, and several decommissioned nuclear submarines with spent nuclear fuel.

Under the Global Partnership program, Russia must secure and destroy these stockpiles.

As part of these efforts, the country's nuclear agency is looking to secure more than $120 million from a number of countries to scrap decommissioned nuclear submarines, with the Russian government providing $70 million for the task in 2006 alone.

Antipov said the governments of Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, France, Canada, Japan, Australia and the European Union would allot the funds, with talks on South Korea joining the program already under way.

Russia hopes to scrap all decommissioned nuclear submarines by 2010, he said, adding that Russia had already spent $200 million on the project, and as of September 2005, the other countries had provided $1.45 billion.

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