MOSCOW, March 22, /ITAR-TASS/. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will lead the Russian delegation to the Nuclear Security Summit to be held in The Hague on March 24-25.
Russia has been consistently fulfilling its international obligations in the field of nuclear security, the Foreign Ministry said on Saturday, March 22. “Russia has joined all key international mechanisms in the field of nuclear security: the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and the 2005 amendment to it, and the international Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism,” it said.
“There are no nuclear materials or facilities in Russia the security of which could raise concerns. All nuclear materials, their storage sites, relevant facilities and transportation of nuclear materials are provided with necessary levels of security,” the ministry said.
Russia constantly improves its rules regulating nuclear security. “We have created a system of effective regulation in the field of nuclear security and we constantly develop new and update existing regulatory acts concerning physical protection of, accounting for and control of nuclear and radioactive materials. All this is done using the experience accumulated in Russia, other countries and international organisations, including the International Atomic Energy Agency,” the ministry said.
It voiced concern that not all states are willing to assume responsibility in this field. “Non-participation in the abovementioned international documents by some countries that have large amounts of nuclear materials complicates further steps to draft and adopt new international legal instruments and political commitments in this field. We are taking active steps towards that. Jointly with the IAEA, we held seminars on the nuclear security culture in November 2012 and December 2013. A demonstration nuclear terrorism exercise, Strazh-2012, took place in the Moscow Region in September 2012, with experts from more than 50 countries attending the event,” the ministry said.
Since 2002, Russia has been collecting fresh and irradiated highly-enriched uranium from Russian-design nuclear research reactors and converting these reactors to the use of low-enriched uranium or halting them.
“A total of 790 kg of fresh and 1,269 kg of irradiated highly-enriched uranium have been removed from 14 countries since the start of the programme,” the ministry said.
The forum in The Hague will be the third one. The previous two were held in Washington in 2010 and Seoul in 2012.