The Bush administration will propose in its budget on Monday the creation of an atomic energy partnership with Russia, offering other countries, such as Iran, a supply of fuel for their reactors under restrictions intended to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons, according to administration officials.

Under the proposal, the United States and Russia would provide reactor fuel to other countries and take back the spent fuel afterward to prevent its use in weaponry. President George W. Bush called for a similar plan two years ago, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has recommended an international fuel system in which it would control custody of nuclear fuel.

Bush's new budget includes about $250 million to continue research on two new technologies intended to significantly reduce the amount of nuclear waste requiring long-term disposal.

But one senior official called those techniques "a long way away," and Bush's own concerns about the plan, some officials say, explain why he did not include it in his State of the Union address last Tuesday.

The American program, once called the Global Nuclear Energy Initiative, will now be called an energy "partnership" to reflect the role of Russia and, eventually, other nations.

The timing is critical, because Russia is already negotiating with Iran on a deal to provide it with reactor fuel that if the Iranians consent could become a model for part of the new program, keeping the fuel technology out of the hands of countries that do not already have nuclear weapons.

In addition to curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, the administration sees the plan as a way to promote the use of nuclear power at home by solving problems with the disposal of radioactive waste. The energy secretary is supposed to tell Congress next year whether a second dump, beyond the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, will be needed. The Yucca Mountain site is planned as the country's first long-term geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste, but it is not clear when the site can be opened.

The new plan relies on an experimental "fast" reactor that has been tried in France and Japan and found to be prone to catching fire and not cost-effective.

The program would also require changes in U.S. law to allow the dumping of foreign-generated waste at Yucca, and would face fierce domestic opposition because it would create a fuel-processing industry that, because it converts solid waste into liquids that could leak, would be potentially more polluting than the current industry.

Frank von Hippel, a physicist at Princeton University and a skeptic about the proposed technology, said the United States would probably have to volunteer to keep the unusable end-product wastes to induce countries to participate. "If they get the high-level waste back, what do they gain?" he said.