MOSCOW, May 27 (RIA Novosti) - Russia and Cuba have agreed to renew their cooperation in nuclear research with Cuba's Nuclear Energy Agency, head of Rosatom Sergei Kiriyenko said on Wednesday.
The announcement came during an awards ceremony in Moscow where Cuban scientific aide Fidel Angel Castro Diaz-Balart, Fidel Castro's son, received the Russian Kurchatov Award for his work in the nuclear sphere.
"On behalf of the entire nuclear division, I present the highest award...the Kurchatov Award, to Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart. Today, we will renew our cooperation at [Cuba's] nuclear research center that will allow us to develop a number of directions in modern science," Kiriyenko said.
Russian-Cuban nuclear cooperation was halted in 1992 after the construction of an atomic plant in Cuba was frozen.
Diaz-Balart, 59, is a member of Cuba's Academy of Sciences and studied theoretical physics in the Soviet Union. He has published numerous scientific papers in Cuba, Spain and Russia.
In the 1980s, he headed Cuba's nuclear agency at the time that the Soviet Union and Cuba started the construction of a nuclear plant. The agency now works in a number of areas in nuclear physics, including biotechnology and the development of nanotechnology.
