Foreign inspectors checking Russian nuclear plants - official
MOSCOW. April 18 (Interfax) - Foreign specialists are finishing checking Russian nuclear power plants as part of worldwide inspections of nuclear plants following the accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant caused by a massive earthquake, said the chief administrator of the Russian civil nuclear industry.
"Today representatives of other states are working at Russian nuclear plants. They are checking to what extent the Russian plants meet their safety demands," Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Rosatom, the state corporation running Russia's civil nuclear sector, told Russian television channel Vesti 24.
Russia's nuclear plants have already been through two rounds of inspections, being first checked by Rosatom and then by the country's Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Nuclear Surveillance (Rostekhnadzor), Kiriyenko said.
He said countries that have delegated their inspectors to Russia are checking their own plants as well.
"Our partners are doing what we are - they are launching inspections both at their existing plants and at all plants that are under construction," Kiriyenko said.
He also said neither India nor China nor any other country that has nuclear plant construction plans has scrapped them because of the Fukushima Daiichi accident.
"We can see that the decisions to halt [nuclear programs] were made by countries that have not yet started on them," he added.