Ukraine announced on Monday, at a 47-nation summit in Washington on prevention of nuclear terrorism, that it would get rid of a stockpile of highly enriched material by 2012.
Speaking on the Russian news channel Russia 24 on Tuesday, Alexei Lebedev, general director of the International Uranium Enrichment Center, said the material would be put in containers and taken to Russia by railway.
"In terms of volume we are apparently speaking of several dozen kilograms," Lebedev said, adding that the fuel either would be taken to Russia's Elektrostal facility or Mayak in Chelyabinsk, east of the Urals.
"We have been conducting this program for a long time. Such material has been brought out of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic, Hungary. The negotiations with Ukraine went on for a long time. I am very glad that they ended positively," he said.
"We are receiving money for the recycling (of the uranium) and the recycling will take place, chiefly, in Russia," Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Andriy Klyuev told journalists on Wednesday.
Klyuev spokes of the risk of a "dirty bomb" being built illegally if such material went astray.
"The least we have of this material in Ukraine, the better we will sleep in our beds," he said.
It was not clear if Russia would take all of the enriched uranium offered up by Ukraine.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Monday that the United States would provide financial and technical assistance to Ukraine and was likely to store some of the highly enriched material on US soil.
Gibbs said at the time that the Ukrainian material was "enough to construct several nuclear weapons.”
Ukraine, a former Soviet state, destroyed its nuclear arsenal after the end of the Cold War and sent its nuclear warheads back to Russia under a 1994 three-way agreement which also included the United States.
