"All the causes that led to the Chernobyl catastrophe have been removed," Nikolai Sorokin, the deputy director of Russia's federal atomic energy agency, told reporters here.

"Chernobyl's managing system was not adapted to the situation. This system has been entirely corrected in the Kursk plant" and is being improved in other nuclear power plants, said Yevgeny Adamov of the Dollezhal Institute, which designed the reactors.

Adamov served as Russia's atomic energy minister between 1998 and 2000.

"An international assessment was carried out in 2002-04 on the Number One reactor of the Kursk plant, and specific programmes were created" for other Russian reactors of the same type, said Michel Shuha from France's Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety Institute.

Three nuclear power plants with 11 reactors among them are currently equipped in Russia with Chernobyl-type reactors -- near the cities of Kursk and Smolensk, in western Russia, and Saint Petersburg, in the country's northwest.

In April 1986, the core of the fourth reactor at the plant of Chernobyl, in Ukraine, exploded and for 10 days spewed radioactive material equivalent to more than 200 Hiroshima bombs into the air, contaminating large swathes of Europe, particularly neighboring Belarus.

The Soviet government said 31 people were killed on the spot.

According to UN figures, between 15,000 and 30,000 have died since the disaster in 1986 and nearly six million people continue to live in contaminated zones.

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