Statement by the President Announcing Additional Steps To Accelerate the Development of Nuclear Power Abroad.

THIS NATION ATTACHES highest importance to the development of nuclear power both at home and abroad. We are determined that this product of man's inventiveness shall be made available to serve the people of the world.

We have taken many actions to this end. We have initiated and actively supported the formation of an International Atomic Energy Agency, we have negotiated bilateral agreements for cooperation with 37 countries, and we have expressed our support for European efforts to form an integrated atomic energy community. On February 22, 1956, I announced that I approved the recommendations of the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission to make available 20,000 kilograms of uranium 235 for distribution abroad.

Today I have approved further important actions by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. These actions will set the terms and conditions on which nuclear fuel will be available under agreements for cooperation. These and other actions are designed to enable other nations or groups of nations to have firm assurance of the fuel supplies necessary to the continued operation of nuclear power installations, and thus to facilitate arrangements for financing.

Under these new actions, the United States will make available to other nations supplies of nuclear fuel at prices identical with those charged by the Atomic Energy Commission under our domestic nuclear power program.

One of the steps I have approved is an offer to purchase at specified prices plutonium and uranium 233 produced in reactors abroad that are fueled with material furnished under our agreements for cooperation. The materials so acquired by the United States will be used solely for peaceful purposes.

Today's actions, summarized in the attached statement by the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, will permit closer estimate of net nuclear fuel costs and will add firmness to the planning now underway in friendly nations for nuclear power, thereby accelerating their atomic power development.

It will be our policy, of course, to seek to conduct our operations in support of nuclear power development abroad in consonance with the policy of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in whose endeavors we shall take our full part.

We shall strive ceaselessly to attain the day when the uses of the energy of the atom fulfill mankind's peaceful purposes.