President Boris Yeltsin is soon to sign a decree that would give the go-ahead for imports of spent nuclear fuel from Western and Asian power plants to be stored and reprocessed in Russia, according to officials and environmentalists.


Alexei Yablokov, chairman of an ecological committee at the Russian Security Council and former adviser to Yeltsin, said the president planned to sign the decree, which would enable foreign nuclear energy producers to help finance construction of a plant for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.


In return, Yablokov said, the plant would store and later recycle imported nuclear fuel rods.


Environmental activists have blocked construction of such a plant in Germany and have protested against operating similar plants in France and Great Britain, arguing that radiation may spread from the plant or from by-products that remain after the recycling process.


They have also objected to exports, arguing that safety can not be guaranteed during transport and that countries should take responsibility for their own nuclear waste.


When the idea was first raised by Russian officials in early 1993, a U.S. State Department official also fiercely objected, arguing that the enriched nuclear materials extracted from the spent fuel rods could end up in the hands of nations eager to build nuclear bombs.


Two presidential spokesmen said in telephone interviews this week that they had not heard of any draft decree that would authorize such imports. But a spokesman for the Nuclear Power Ministry, Vitaly Nasonov, confirmed that Yeltsin had recently promised to order that construction of the plant, on the bank of the Yenisey river in the Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk-26, should resume.


Construction had been halted for lack of funding, and Nasonov said the project could be revived only if foreign financing were found. To that end, the ministry is already negotiating imports of spent nuclear fuel rods with Western and Asian firms, he said.


The question still to be answered, Nasonov said, is not whether to import the rods, but whether the countries sending them should be forced to take back any radioactive by-products from the recycling process. Russia already imports spent nuclear fuel from plants built by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, and the by-products stay here, he said.


Yablokov and other environmental activists fiercely rejected the government plan.


"Yeltsin is about to take a wrong decision," Yablokov said in a telephone interview, accusing the Nuclear Power Ministry of feeding Yeltsin distorted information on the project. "We will try to block this decree."


Yablokov wrote in Izvestia last week that the cost of polluting Russian soil by storing and processing foreign nuclear fuel would be far higher than the financial benefits of attracting investments.


According to environmentalists, the project would also break a parliament ban on importing radioactive waste, but Dmitry Tolmatsky of Greenpeace added that experts differ on whether spent nuclear fuel counts as waste.


Valery Bulatov, nuclear expert for the Socio-Ecological Union, said the special trains that carry the nuclear fuel rods are routed through the centers of major cities, placing millions of people at risk, although he added that none of the trains have ever crashed.


A South Korean embassy official confirmed in early 1993 that his country was interested in sending spent nuclear fuel to Russia, but Japanese and South Korean Embassy spokesmen said they had not heard of any recent negotiations with Russia.


U.S. officials have warned that plutonium extracted from the rods could be used to build nuclear bombs, but Hans Meyer, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the agency would have no objection to such deals. The agency could send in inspectors to ensure that the plutonium would not be diverted for military purposes, he said. The French firm Cogema and the German electronics giant Siemens already send nuclear materials for enrichment to Russia, but spokesmen at both companies rejected allegations by Greenpeace that they send in highly radioactive nuclear waste.


The spokesmen said that Siemens sends in scrap waste containing natural uranium, while Cogema exports only natural and reprocessed uranium to Russia. Natural uranium is only mildly radioactive.