Russia said in late May it plans to complete a program to remove spent nuclear fuel from research reactors in 17 countries by 2012-2013.
"The removal will proceed under the aegis of the IAEA, in line with a Russian-U.S. agreement on the removal of spent nuclear fuel from research reactors in Eastern European and CIS countries," a spokesman for Techsnabexport said.
IAEA officials established earlier that spent nuclear fuel storage conditions at Serbia's Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences did not meet nuclear security standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The reactor was built to Soviet designs in 1959 and decommissioned in 2002. That same year, Serbia transferred to Russia about 48 kilograms of highly enriched nuclear fuel.
Techsnabexport deputy head Alexei Lebedev said earlier it will cost about $150-200 million to remove the spent fuel from 20 reactors built in the 1960s and 1970s in the former Soviet bloc.
He said the company, which provides about 35% of global uranium supplies, has already completed the removal of spent fuel from Uzbekistan via Kazakhstan over the winter, and that the next countries in line were Latvia, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan and Serbia.
Work on removing Russian-produced uranium from foreign research reactors is being conducted within the framework of a Russian-U.S. agreement, and is financed by the United States.
