The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also found traces of plutonium, a potential atomic weapons material, in "hot cells" used to handle radioactive material, the report said, with Egypt saying this was due to contamination rather than plutonium production.

The report said Egypt's failures to comply with international nuclear safeguards agreements, including not reporting the building of a plutonium reprocessing facility, were "a matter of concern" but that Cairo was now cooperating and had claimed it had erred as it had not understood its reporting obligations.

The Egypt report will be submitted to a meeting that opens in Vienna February 28 of the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors.

The board decides whether to take nations that violate safeguards to the Security Council but this is unlikely for Egypt as its reporting failures were in some cases decades ago and Cairo has been forthcoming about them.

Egyptian ambassador Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy told AFP the IAEA report "puts to rest the unnecesary and unwarranted speculation that has been in the press for some time . . . all of these experiments are consistent with the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty)."

Diplomats said the lingering question about Egypt's nuclear program was whether it was carefully structured to be able to move towards weapons development if Cairo decided to take this step.

A senior diplomat close to the IAEA described the incidents as minor, with some taking place as long as 40 years ago, and said they could be related to research into the nuclear fuel cycle in order to build power plants, as Egypt claims, rather than part of an atomic weapons program.

Egypt had sought in the late 1970s to construct eight nuclear power plants to produce electricity but did not build any.

"The nuclear material and facilities seen by the agency to date are consistent with the activities described by Egypt," which are strictly peaceful, the report said.

It added that Egypt has already dismantled a uranium conversion facility.

Egypt was now using the laboratory, originally built for reprocessing plutonium, to store radioactive material intended for medical purposes. The laboratory was never completed due to a "foreign vendor" not getting an export license for essential equipment.

But "irrespective of the current status of the previously undeclared activities and the small amounts of nuclear material involved, the repeated failures by Egypt to report nuclear materials and facilities to the agency in a timely manner are a matter of concern," the report said.

"Egypt has explained that its past failure to report was attributable to a lack of clarity about its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement," it added.

Some of the activities that went unreported pre-date Egypt signing on to the safeguards agreement of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1982.

But Egypt failed to report as of 1982, 67 kilograms (147 pounds) of imported uranium gas that is used in enriching uranium and several other products used in enrichment, the report said.

Egypt also failed to report "irradiation of natural uranium and thorium" experiments.

But the diplomat close to the IAEA said Egypt's undeclared work was small-scale and not comparable to Iran, which the IAEA has investigated for two years, or even to South Korea, which has admitted to carrying out rogue nuclear experiments.

Egypt did not do any enrichment, the diplomat said.

Egypt admitted on January 27 to failing to signal a "number of research experiments" to the IAEA, after diplomats said the agency was investigating an Egyptian lab that could be used to make plutonium.

The reprocessing laboratory is at Egypt's Inshass center, 35 kilometresmiles) northeast of Cairo, where there are two research reactors, and consists of "hot laboratories, procured from France in the early 1980s, which allow for treatment of spent fuel and laboratory-scale plutonium separation," a diplomat said.

The plutonium contamination was found not at the laboratory but in hot cells attached to one of the research reactors, the report said.

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