OREANDA-NEWS.  On the 16th of September, 2013, in Vienna Sergey Kirienko, the Director General of the State Atomic Energy Corporation ROSATOM, and Ernest Moniz, the Secretary of the United States Department of Energy, on behalf of the governments of the two countries signed the Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Cooperation in Nuclear and Energy Research and Development (R&D Agreement).

This document expands provisions of the basic Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the United States of America for Cooperation in the Field of Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, which came into force on January 11, 2011, and determined a general framework of the cooperation of both countries in the field of the peaceful uses of atomic energy.

The R&D Agreement signed today opens broad opportunities for establishing contacts between laboratories and institutes of Russia and the United States of America to carry out applied and basic research pillared by promising technologies. The agreement also regulates the access procedures regarding research facilities.

The R&D Agreement points out a number of cooperation areas, which open prospects of the long-term interaction in directions, such as civil nuclear power,, design of nuclear power plants and new nuclear reactor fuels; nuclear science; the use of nuclear and radiation technologies in medicine and industry; and radioactive waste management. Special attention will still be paid to nuclear nonproliferation issues, nuclear and radiation safety. The R&D Agreement includes an annex with provisions on allocation, protection and safeguarding the intellectual property rights.

Following the signing of the agreement, the parties made a joint statement for the press. In particular, they pointed out that the work on the R&D Agreement had started in June 2011 when the parties signed a joint statement to say for building a sound basis of the cooperation in nuclear and energy research and development. When the agreement is in force, the parties will start implementing it in frames of the joint Working Group on Nuclear Power and Nuclear Security of the Russia-U.S. Presidential Commission.