Valdai Club

On August 7, new US sanctions against Iran came into force. The European Union declared its intention to block them in order to protect European companies working in Tehran. Can this policy be successful? What are the prospects of the US-EU and US-Iran confrontation and what does the future hold for the fragile Iranian “nuclear deal”?

On June 4, 2018, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave orders to be ready for build-up of uranium enrichment and plutonium processing. Earlier, the country’s leadership declared its readiness to honor obligations under the nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA) even despite the US withdrawal from it. Anton Khlopkov, Director of the Center for Energy and Security Studies (CENESS), discusses the intentions of Iran, its economic relations with the EU and the future of the nuclear deal in an interview with valdaiclub.com.

45 out of the 60 countries which planned to develop nuclear power before the Fukushima disaster continue to consider it an option for meeting their energy needs in the future.

Amid rising global interest in nuclear energy in 2005–2010, Middle Eastern states announced plans to build a total of about 90 nuclear power reactors at 26 sites by 2030.

North Korean scientists have made considerable progress in building national nuclear capability over the past decades.

Egypt is a major player in the Middle East and Russia is not the only country willing to bring its nuclear technology to the Egyptian market.

Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy giant Rosatom is the world leader in NPP exports. It has a portfolio of contracts to build 25 nuclear power reactors, and is involved in all three Middle Eastern NPP projects currently under way.

Ukraine has never been a nuclear weapons-state and never had control over the nuclear weapons that were located on its territory following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It doesn’t have the research, technical or industrial capacity to develop and produce nuclear weapons in the short term.

Russia is bankrolling a number of nuclear-cleansing projects in post-Soviet republics. Some cases in point are the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan and a number of uranium mines in other Central Asian countries. This change is explained by Russia’s new economic capabilities and its success in dealing with major nuclear challenges at home.

Iran continues to send signals of its willingness to pursue further cooperation with Russia at the Bushehr NPP site. The construction of two new energy reactors might soon commence on the Persian Gulf coast. Russia has its own reasons to pursue such cooperation. Moscow needs an infrastructure project that would serve as an anchor in Russian-Iranian relations.