English

Loan agreement for nuclear power plant project may be signed within month, Putin says

An agreement on Russia’s loan to finance the construction of a nuclear power plant in Belarus may be signed within a month, Vladimir Putin told reporters in Minsk on Tuesday night following a meeting of the prime ministers of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, BelaPAN said.

According to the Russian premier, the size of such a loan “depends on how much equipment the customer country manufactures or does not manufacture itself.” “In the case of Belarus, there may be a loan of about $6 billion,” he said, adding that the possibility of lending to fund the construction of the necessary infrastructure was also under consideration.

When asked about the safety of nuclear power plants in the context of the current nuclear crisis in Japan, Mr. Putin said that it would be impossible to meet the world’s electricity demand without nuclear energy. He cited the example of France where, according to him, nuclear plants account for some 80 percent of all electricity output.

He described the current situation regarding Japan’s nuclear plants as a “concatenation of circumstances,” which he said include the fact that Japanese plants have 40-year-old equipment.

There are much more modern nuclear power-generating units in the world at present, which are equipped with safety systems that completely eliminate the possibility of what has happened to the Japanese plants, Mr. Putin noted.

Such modern plants are being built in Russia and such a plant will be built in Belarus, he said.