Grigory Naginsky, chairman of Federation Council Sub-Committee on Natural Monopolies

– The last two years have shown that Kiriyenko is very efficient manager

The ideas we just formerly had in theory have been quickly put into practice by Kiriyenko and his team. They have done really huge work and today we have the road map and the federal target program for the development of our nuclear energy in the next 10–15 years. We have also drafted and adopted laws on the establishment of Atomenergoprom OJSC and Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation.

The implementation of the federal program has started with the launch of the Novovoronezh NPP-2 and Leningrad NPP-2 projects. What we need now is to quickly and effectively design the plants we are going to build and to solve one more important problem – to train personnel for the projects. Otherwise, in 2–3 years we may run short of specialists.

Next year the federal program will show its real ability: we will have to spend over 600bln RUR on it against 18bln RUR this year – three times more!

This year Russia has made a practical contribution to the strengthening of the nonproliferation regime – instead of making just impressive political statements – we have established an international center for uranium enrichment. This center is a great chance for many countries to start developing nuclear power production and to get guaranteed fuel supply for their future nuclear power plants. Guaranteed fuel supply means that those countries will have no need to enrich uranium on their own.

I would also like to point out the success of our nuclear specialists in overcoming the consequences of the serious incident at Paks Nuclear Power Plant in Hungary (3rd level on INES scale: some 30 fuel rods were damaged when cleaned by Framatome NP technology on Apr 10 2003). The French side refused to remove the damage. Our rivals in the relevant tender said that they would do the work in 5–10 years. Our specialists from TVEL did the work in 3 years and at 5–6 times lower price. I think that this project has strengthened our partnership with our Hungarian colleagues and we will still have many new fruitful projects.

The offer of President Putin is the result of the fruitful work of Kiriyenko in the past two years. This offer has proved that our authorities support Rosatom’s policies and that our nuclear industry will develop.

To remind, President of Russia Vladimir Putin is going to appoint Sergey Kiriyenko as head of Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation as he believes that Kiriyenko is the best candidate for the post of the head of the corporation.