MOSCOW, April 2. /TASS/. Bangladesh wishes to cooperate with Russian nuclear corporation Rosatom on projects in third countries, Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel.
He recalled that local contractors have taken part in the construction of the Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant in Bangladesh, and their professionalism has grown as a result.
"Today, tens of thousands of people, citizens of Bangladesh, are involved in this project. They have received new skills, they have high salaries. Bangladesh really wants to develop this competence further not only in the country, but also by acting as our partner in implementing projects in third countries, and we are also discussing this with our Bangladeshi partners," Likhachev said.
According to Likhachev, Rosatom offers Bangladesh the entire range of its competencies.
"This includes the construction of small nuclear power plants, including floating ones, and as you know, Bangladesh is both a sea and river power. This also includes creating centers of nuclear science and technology in the interests of nuclear medicine, in the interests of agriculture, in the interests of scientific research, and, probably any country developing nuclear energy should also think about atomic science. This is important, and one supports the other," Likhachev noted.
Rosatom is ready to offer non-nuclear competencies to Bangladesh as well.
"[This refers to] everything related to wind energy, digital products, industrial technologies. In general, as they say, what is ours is also yours - we are happy to share with our partners. The more we share our technologies and our competencies with them, the richer we become in such technologies and competencies, this is a kind of obvious paradox," the Director General of Rosatom noted.
In November 2011, Russia and Bangladesh signed an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in constructing the first Bangladeshi nuclear power plant, Rooppur (160 km west of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka). The plant will be equipped with two power units with VVER-1200 reactors. At the beginning of 2017, the Russian government provided Bangladesh with a state loan in the amount of $11.38 billion to finance the nuclear power plant’s main stage of construction. Construction of the first power unit began on November 30, 2017, and construction of the second started on July 14, 2018. Rosatom is planning the physical launch of unit 1 in December 2024.