ULAN BATOR. Aug 25 (Interfax-AVN) - Russia and Mongolia have reached an agreement to set up a joint venture to extract natural uranium, Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of the state nuclear corporation Rosatom, has announced.
"We are signing an intergovernmental agreement to form a joint venture to develop, extract and process uranium. Russia is the first country to have signed an agreement with Mongolia on joint uranium operations. It is an important political signal," Kiriyenko said in Ulan Bator on Tuesday in answer to a question from Interfax.
The joint venture is being formed under "party-of-interests arrangements," he said.
The agreement to set up the joint venture capped President Dmitry Medvedev's talks in Ulan Bator on Tuesday.
On March 17 2009, Mongolia's Nuclear Energy Agency and Rosatom signed an interagency agreement, saying that such ventures will operate on a 50-to-50 basis, Kiriyenko said.
The joint venture to be formed will be primarily interested in developing the Dornod uranium mine, as well as uranium fields in Mongolia's Eastern Gobi region, he said.
"Dornod is interesting to us, among other things, because Russia's Priargunsky mining enterprise is located about 200 kilometers from it, which allows us to form a single infrastructure and draw our specialists," Kiriyenko also said.
Besides that, "we are confident that the reserves of the Dornod field can be increased," he said.
Kiriyenko did not say how much Russia is prepared to invest in the development of the Dornod field, saying only that "hundreds of millions of dollars could be involved."
Asked when the joint venture could start working, Kiriyenko said that this could happen in the very near future. "We think that the bulk of the work to form the joint venture could be done this year," he said
The project will involve the company AtomMon on the Mongolian side and Atomredmetzoloto on the Russian side, Kiriyenko said.