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| Politics
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| Russia, US sign civil nuclear pact |
| Russian and US officials signed a key agreement on civilian nuclear power on Tuesday that could give Washington access to Russian technology
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 7-May-2008
8:32:48 AM |
| Russian and US officials signed a key agreement on civilian nuclear power on Tuesday that could give Washington access to Russian technology and potentially hand Moscow lucrative deals on storing spent fuel.
The deal, signed on the eve of Dmitry Medvedev's inauguration as president, signals a reversal in policy for the US administration on cooperating with Russia on nuclear issues.
Cooperation had cooled in recent years, mainly due to disagreements over how to handle Iran's perceived nuclear threat.
''The US and Russia were once nuclear rivals,'' US Ambassador William Burns said after a signing ceremony. ''Today, we are nuclear partners with unique capabilities and unique responsibilities for global nuclear leadership.''
But the agreement ran into immediate trouble on Capitol Hill, where two senators said they would try to block it because it could hurt efforts to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
Sen Norm Coleman, R-Minn., along with Sen Evan Bayh, D-Ind., are circulating a letter that will urge Bush not to send the pact to Congress. The senators say Russia's exports of nuclear fuel to Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant and opposition to the United Nations sanctions against Iran make the new deal suspect.
But the Bush administration now views Russia as a partner in the effort to persuade Iran to abandoned its nuclear weapons ambitions and a State Department official said Russia's assistance to the Iranian power plant was not seen as an issue.
The deal - signed by Burns and Russian atomic energy chief Sergei Kiriyenko - will give the US access to Russian state-of-the art nuclear technology.
That would be important for the Washington, where nuclear development was virtually dormant in the wake of a 1979 reactor accident at Three Mile Island in the US and the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear explosion in the Soviet Union, experts say.
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