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French Nuclear Store

MOSCOW () -- French engineering firm Spie-Batignolles will build a store to house Russian nuclear components as part of a $80 million deal to help Russia disarm, French officials said.


The store, for non-radioactive nuclear components, will be built near Novosibirsk in central Siberia at a cost of about $25 million, an official at the French state nuclear agency Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) said.


He said the contract was signed in Paris by foreign ministers Alain Juppe and Andrei Kozyrev earlier this month and was part of a disarmament assistance deal agreed in February 1992 by Presidents Francois Mitterrand and Boris Yeltsin.


Under the 10-year contract, France will build special containers and a 5,000 square meter warehouse to store lithium hydride, a component of hydrogen bombs.

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