All legal formalities have been completed and construction of Uzbekistan’s first commercial nuclear power station could officially begin within the year, Alexey Likhachev, director-general of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom said.

“Not if, but when the leadership of Uzbekistan returns to the topic of a nuclear power plant, we will already have proposals ready, not only on the design of future facilities, but also on financing and local manufacturing,” Likhachev told Russia’s state news outlet Tass.

Likhachev was speaking this week during an industrial exhibition in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, where Uzbekistan’s president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, said cooperation with Russia in the field of peaceful nuclear energy was “developing rapidly”.