MOSCOW, December 13. /TASS/. The International Atomic Energy Agency has agreed to use Russian labs for monitoring the quality of wastewater that is discharged into the ocean from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant starting next year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

"We have given the IAEA a list of our laboratories that can and know how to analyze the relevant substances, including water, and we have explicitly said that we are asking these laboratories to be included in the list of those that will monitor quality as the implementation - and it will be a long process - of this Japanese project goes on," he told the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. "We were assured that they will be involved starting from next year, and we will try to do everything so that it will be transparent to our public."

Lavrov said Russian representatives and their Chinese counterparts "from the very start raised the issue at the IAEA of putting this process (of discharging radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant - TASS) under the control of this respected organization."

"The IAEA Secretariat now has an obligation to pay special attention to this issue," the minister went on to say. "They occasionally provide reports that are not alarming in nature, but still do not cover this issue definitively, because many questions remain unanswered."

He said it primarily concerns the question to which extent the discharge of wastewater "will have a negative impact on the environment and on bioresources, which are consumed by our people, among others."