MOSCOW -- In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet Union will require its nuclear power plants to meet 'enhanced' safety standards and propose an international treaty outlawing attacks on reactors, a senior atomic energy official said today.
'We have no intention to give up the development of atomic energetics, naturally on condition that the level of safety of atomic power stations will be enhanced,' Andranik Petrosyants, chairman of the State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy, said in an interview with Tass news agency.
The Soviet Union views the creation of international standards and instructions for the maintenance of atomic power stations and a system of global early notification of accidents as 'extremely important,' he said.
'On our part we are drawing up proposals for the adoption of such measures,' he told the official news agency.
According to the 12th five-year economic development plan adopted as law by the country's Supreme Soviet earlier this month, the production of nuclear-produced electricity would increase from the current 167 billion kilowatt hours to 390 billion by 1990.
Petrosyants said the Soviet Union would press for an international treaty at a scheduled meeting later this year of the U.N. affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna that would outlaw attacks on power stations, such as that in June 1981 by Israeli warplanes on the Osiris research reactor near the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.
The reactor was built for Iraq by the Soviet Union.
'It is also necessary to draw up a treaty on non-attacking atomic power stations. Deplorably, there was such an attack. It was the raid of Israeli warplanes on a nuclear research reactor in Iraq.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has sounded a similiar theme in several recent statements.
The April 26 Chernobyl accident in the Ukraine 600 miles southwest of Moscow has left at least 26 people dead, according to official figures.
An explosion and fire at the station sent a cloud of radioactive debris drifting across much of eastern Russia and Europe blanketing farm lands and crops with radiation.
More than 100,000 people have been evacuated from a 19 mile radius danger zone around the plant but recently some peasants have been returned to work collective farms in the area.
A concrete cushion has been built under the damaged reactor preventing a leak of radioactivity into underground water tables.
