WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- The IAEA's Mohamed ElBaradei wants to set up a world nuclear fuel bank to supply individual countries and prevent them from enriching their own fuel.
"We need a multi-national facility and a bank to guarantee that if a country isn't developing weapons (of mass destruction) it can get fuel," ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told a conference Monday on non-proliferation organized by the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He said Russia and the United States have both offered to make nuclear fuel available to the IAEA for the fuel bank program, which would be run by the agency.
Once an assured supply has been set up, "no single country will have the right to enrich uranium on its own," ElBaradei said. "You have taken away the justification for countries to say, 'I'd like to make my own fuel,' and that's 80 percent of the problem."
He said the IAEA would begin building stocks of nuclear fuel next year.
