Russia is prepared to start delivering nuclear fuel to a power plant it is building in Iran, Alexander Rumyantsev, minister of atomic energy, said Monday after talks in Tehran aimed at concluding the US$800 million deal.
The Russian minister said the fuel was already packed and that he hoped it would be shipped to Iran soon. "The first batch of fuel for the Bushehr nuclear plant produced by Russia is ready and packed. Russia is trying to make necessary preparations for its shipment," Iran's official IRNA news agency quoted Rumyantsev as saying.
Iran's head of the Atomic Energy Organisation, Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh, said storage facilities were in place.
Negotiations on the return of spent fuel for reprocessing in Russia appear to have been completed, with Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid- Reza Asefi, quoted as saying Iran had previously agreed to this.
"Iran has accepted to return the waste fuel to Russia as one of the terms for starting the shipment of fuel," an official at Iran's Atomic Energy Agency told Reuters. (Albawaba.com)
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