Russia, Kazakhstan set up uranium enrichment centre

ASTANA, May 10 (Reuters) Russia and Kazakhstan announced the creation of a joint uranium enrichment centre today and said other nations could buy the finished product for use to generate energy.

Energy ministers from both countries signed an agreement on the centre during a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Central Asian state's capital, Astana.

''This is not all that we can do together in atomic energy,'' Putin said after the talks.

''We have very serious and great perspectives in our cooperation in this critically important sphere.'' The enrichment centre will be at Angarsk in Siberia.

''The idea ... is to create some practical mechanism so many countries that want to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes can use such infrastructure,'' Kazakh Foreign Minister Marat Tazhin told Reuters in Washington yesterday.

''Any country that wants to use this can use it.'' Kazakhstan, a rapidly growing oil producer, has focused on increasing its uranium production as part of aggressive plans to profit from a global nuclear renaissance and, leapfrogging Australia and Canada, jump from No. 3 to No. 1 producer by 2010.

It signed a string of uranium mining deals last year with French, Canadian and Japanese companies and last December opened a new uranium mine joint venture with Russia.

Kazakhstan needs outside help to fully exploit its uranium supplies, which amount to a fifth of global reserves. Russia, on the other hand, needs new nuclear fuel sources as its own reserves get depleted.

REUTERS DS ND1722