Russia to Agree Energy Security Strategy With G8 Partners – Official

Text of report by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS

Vienna, 26 September: During Russia’s chairmanship of the G8 in 2006, Moscow will agree an energy security strategy with its partners. The chief of Rosatom [Russian Atomic Energy Agency], Aleksandr Rumyantsev, said here today that “an energy security strategy is expected to be agreed with partners for the sake of reliably providing the world economy and population with various kinds of energy”.

He confirmed that “international energy security has been selected as one of the main topics” for the period of Russia’s chairmanship of the G8 in 2006.

The Rosatom chief said that, “even according to the most conservative estimates, the development of the world economy by 2050 will require a more than double increase in the production of energy on the planet”. “There is a firm conviction that this double increase cannot be achieved only by using organic fuels and nontraditional sources of energy, such as water, wind and the sun,” he said. “We maintain that nuclear energy has a future. The development of this industry primarily depends on how issues of nuclear weapon nonproliferation, ensuring safety and safe-keeping of nuclear materials, improving its [energy's] competitiveness, handling spent nuclear fuel and radioactive nuclear waste are solved.”

“We believe that the innovative potential of modern nuclear power engineering makes it possible to use it as the basis for an energy system capable of ensuring a stable development of the civilization in the 21st century by providing it with an ecologically clean, safe, economically profitable and socially acceptable source of energy,” Rumyantsev said explaining Russia’s position. “The role of the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] is therefore growing many times over because we view coordination of research efforts and consolidation of efforts of the agency members as a key element of this cooperation.”