By the end of this year Russia and US hope to finalize the problem of the fissile materials storage facility at Mayak PA

29.08.2007 // Interfax

By the end of this year Russia and the US may find a mutually acceptable solution to the problem of transparency of the fissile materials storage facility at Mayak PA

By the end of this year Russia and the United States may find a mutually beneficial solution to the problem of transparency of the fissile materials storage facility at Mayak Production Association (Chelyabinsk region), the head of Rosatom Sergey Kiriyenko said on Tuesday after a meeting with US senators.

“We disagree on certain matters but we hope to find a mutually acceptable solution by the end of this year,” Kiriyenko said.

In his turn, US Senator Richard Lugar, who is known as one of the author of the Nunn-Lugar program, said that the US needs the transparency agreement in order to understand what is going at the facility.

The fissile materials storage facility at Mayak PA was built in the framework of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, a US project providing funding and expertise for states in the former Soviet Union (including Russia) to decommission nuclear, biological and chemical weapon stockpiles. The US Congress allocated $412.6mln for the project, the Russian authorities – 436.369mln RUR. The facility was commissioned in 2003 and in July 2006 received the first lot of fissile materials (mostly plutonium). The agreement on the transparency of that facility stipulates access for US experts.