Russia, Venezuela to cooperate on nuclear power

Moscow, Agencias
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Russia's Dmitri Medvedev agreed here Friday to extend bilateral cooperation to the field of nuclear energy.

"I don't know who is going to shudder," the Venezuelan president said.

"Our goals are clean and transparent," added Medvedev, commenting on the intergovernmental accord signed Friday for the joint development of nuclear energy, which will include building a 500 MW atomic plant in Venezuela.

"For us, atomic energy is vital," Chavez said without hiding his enthusiasm for the project, and even recalled that in the 1950s his country became the first in South America to have a nuclear reactor.

"For now we're talking about preliminary studies. We don't even know when we'll be able to start construction, not to mention putting it into operation," a ranking member of Chavez's delegation told Efe.

At another extreme was a more down-to-earth project but no less ambitious: Russia is ready to invest billions of dollars in Venezuelan agriculture, particularly in growing bananas.

Neither party gave any details about the project, but one comment from Medvedev indicated its great scale: in the first stage alone, he said, it will create 20,000 jobs.

This Russian-Venezuelan summit, the ninth since Chavez took office in 1999, was perhaps the first in which military cooperation and the supply of Russian armament to Caracas was not the center of attention.

While Medvedev said that military cooperation retains its importance, the growth of cooperation in other areas appears to have relegated it to a secondary status.

Russia will continue its expansion in Venezuela's oil sector with the acquisition of BP Plc's assets in the Andean nation, including oilfields that produce a total of 120,000 barrels per day.

In the energy field, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin told Efe that "there's not a single sector in the wide spectrum of possible areas of cooperation in which we're not already working."

On Friday the two parties also signed a pact to create a joint venture in maritime oil shipping.

Another agreement involved the deep-water extraction of natural gas, particularly in Lake Maracaibo, and extending to new areas the oil prospecting and drilling that the Russian consortium Gazprom has undertaken in Venezuela.

Both presidents especially spoke of political cooperation in pursuit of what Medvedev called "a just world order that does not depend on the well-being or state of mind of a single country."

The reference appeared to excite the Venezuelan leader, who went back to the language of communist days when the Soviet Union called itself the "beacon of oppressed peoples."

"The Soviet Union left a legacy and you are the sons of the Soviet Union, and all this progress would not have been possible without the Russian Revolution, without the sacrifice of millions of men and women who built a road that now Russia in its generosity is opening to Venezuela and all the peoples of the world," Chavez said.