“Jointly, these communities will work to further develop advanced technologies that can address some of our most pressing nuclear energy and nuclear security challenges,” he added in a statement.

Sergey Kirienko, the director general of Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy corporation, also signed the deal in Vienna.

The agreement underscores the prospects of long-term interaction between the two countries in critical areas including “civil nuclear power; design of nuclear power plants and new nuclear reactor fuels; nuclear science; the use of nuclear and radiation technologies in medicine and industry; and radioactive waste management,” Rosatom said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Special attention will still be paid to nuclear nonproliferation issues, nuclear and radiation safety,” the Rosatom statement added.

The two countries said the “Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Russian Federation on Cooperation in Nuclear- and Energy-Related Scientific Research and Development” supplies the legal foundation needed to expand a more basic agreement between the two countries which went into effect in January 2011.

It further builds on the success of a 1992 pact known as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Agreement, which expired in June and provided for secure transportation, storage and destruction of weapons and worked to prevent weapons proliferation, according to the US Department of Energy (DOE).

The agreement paves the way for the two countries to collaborate on such projects as a research reactor under development and scheduled to be opened in Dimitrovgrad in 2019, which will be used for the testing of nuclear fuel as well as fuel cycle research, according to Nuclear Street, an online provider of information on the nuclear power industry.