Moscow, 30 December: Russia's nuclear industry exported products and services to the tune of over 3.5bn dollars in 2004, a spokesman for the Russian Federal Agency for Atomic Energy (Rosatom) told ITAR- TASS today. "Uranium products from Russia currently meet 30 per cent of all fuel requirements of foreign nuclear [power] stations," the spokesman added.

Furthermore, the Rosatom spokesman said, "last year, industry specialists entered the final stage of construction and commissioning operations at No 1 and No 2 generating units of the Tianwan nuclear power plant [NPP] in China, No 1 unit of the Bushehr NPP in Iran, and No 1 set of the Kudankulam NPP in India."

Summing up the results of the year at his meeting with journalists, Rosatom head Aleksandr Rumyantsev also paid special tribute to Russian specialists' successes "in the implementation of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Inpro - International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles".

Among Rosatom's foreign economic achievements of the year, Rumyantsev listed the signing of an intergovernmental agreement between Russia and South Africa on cooperation in the use of atomic energy, and joint implementation of a set of tasks with the US Department of Energy to reduce terrorist threats and improve systems for accounting for and monitoring radioactive substances and radioactive waste. Rumyantsev also noted "mutually beneficial cooperation of [nuclear] industry enterprises with the Franco- German Framatome company to produce and supply nuclear fuel to NPPs in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden".

Speaking of the successes of the fundamental and applied research, the Rosatom head noted "the completion of the design of the main industrial know-how for the production of research- intensive equipment for the systems of the International Thermonuclear [Experimental] Reactor (ITER)". "The supply of this equipment is Russia's contribution to the project at the stage of the construction of the reactor". [Passage omitted]

In Russia, Rumyantsev said, "development work on the project of an NPP with a VVER-1500 reactor with a 1,500-MW capacity reached full strength in the course of the year". "We shall start constructing this, the most powerful reactor in Russia, in 2007." "Even now, this new reactor is being offered for export, above all to China," Rumyantsev said.