By IANS,
New Delhi : A month after India entered into a nuclear pact with Russia, leading Russian nuclear company TVEL Wednesday signed a deal to supply uranium to Indian nuclear plants.
Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Atomenergoprom said that its unit, TVEL, and Indian officials had signed the latest deal under which “the total cost of contracts is more than $700 million”.
TVEL signed a contract for fuel supplies to Indian nuclear power plants, a spokesman for India’s Nuclear Energy Department said.
This was the first long-term nuclear fuel supply contract that any company has signed with India since the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) lifted curbs on selling some nuclear fuel and equipment to India in September last year.
Under the deal, which was signed in Mumbai, TVEL will supply around 2,000 tonnes of uranium pellets to Indian nuclear power plants.
“All the technical details of cooperation with our Indian partners were worked out very quickly and approval took no more than three months,” TVEL vice president Vasily Konstantinov said.
The fuel supply will help Indian reactors to operate more efficiently as most of them are running below their capacity due to severe crunch.
India and Russia signed a bilateral civil nuclear cooperation pact during the visit of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to New Delhi Dec 5. The bilateral pact envisages Moscow building additional four nuclear reactors in Kudankuam in Tamil Nadu and to help in constructing other nuclear deals.
India has signed bilateral civil nuclear pacts with the US, France, Russia and Kazakhstan. Last month, India inked a uranium supply deal with Kazakhstan.
TVEL is one of the world’s leading producers of nuclear fuel. It supplies atomic fuel to 73 commercial and 30 research reactors in 13 countries.