MOSCOW, February 20 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's proposal to enrich uranium for Iranian power plants on Russian territory means that Tehran will not have access to a full nuclear fuel cycle, a popular Russian daily wrote Monday.
Hours before talks with Iran opened in Moscow on the latter's initiative to build a uranium enrichment joint venture in Russia, Vremya Novostei published an interview with ex-Nuclear Power Minister Viktor Mikhailov, who now heads the Institute of Strategic Stability, an analytical center attached to the Federal Agency for Nuclear Power.
Mikhailov said the crux of the proposal would be that Iran would have only "closed access" to nuclear fuel.
"We would reequip one of our plants to accommodate an international [nuclear fuel] center where Iran would send uranium enrichment orders for a certain price," Mikhailov said. "We would enrich fuel, supply it to Iran, load a reactor, and bring the spent fuel back to Russia."
The expert said that uranium enrichment could be conducted for both peaceful needs and military purposes, thereby echoing international concerns that Iran might be seeking to build nuclear weapons, an accusation the Islamic Republic has repeatedly denied.
Mikhailov said it was therefore important to curb the spread of enrichment technology.
However, he said that all countries had the right to peaceful nuclear energy and suggested that international enrichment centers would spare them the need to seek the full enrichment cycle.
The expert dismissed the argument that Iran could use spent nuclear fuel to build a nuclear bomb, saying it was "technologically impossible."
While admitting that spent uranium contained the plutonium isotopes necessary for military production, Mikhailov said, "Uranium cannot just be taken out of a storage facility for reprocessing or even transportation. It has to 'cool down' in a power plant storage facility to become less radioactive. The process can take five or even 10 years."
He added that specially equipped plants were needed for reprocessing and Iran would only be able to do that in 10 or 20 years' time, as the country did not have a single such facility.
Mikhailov also said that Russia planned to buy the spent fuel from Iran, adding it had been the Soviet Union's usual scheme in nuclear transactions with its European allies - Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. Russia had bought uranium irradiated in nuclear reactors from those countries, as they were unable to process the spent fuel themselves, the expert said.
He said Iran understood that it could not keep the fuel on its territory.
Asked to comment on Tehran's plans to build another nuclear power plant in its southwestern province of Khuzestan and the possibility that it would build a further 10-20 units if no economic sanctions were imposed on it, Mikhailov said that the country had pursued such plans under the last sheikh, who was forced into an exile following the 1979 revolution and was known as a devoted ally of the United States.
Mikhailov said that the construction of a reactor in the port of Bushehr in southern Iran had been started by German industrial giant Siemens, which had abandoned the project after constructing two buildings. Russia picked up one of them in the early 1990s.
"Iran is a modern country, which has the right to pursue the development of national civilian power engineering. The nuclear powers, for their part, must help its efforts in this sphere," Mikhailov said.
