The Arctic as a resource base
What’s wrong with Russia’s official documents on the Arctic.
News
Publish date: October 29, 2004
News
Russias oldest reactor at the Leningrad Power Plant near the border with Finland was shut down last year. But officials re-launched it this month for at least another five years pending modernization. On October 10, the reactor no.1 was shut down when its emergency security system suddenly signaled an alarm. Oleg Bodrov, head of Green World, said the reasons of sudden shut down of the reactor had to do with many infringements of procedures when the start up of the reactor began.
The Leningrad Nuclear Power Station, or LAES, is causing serious ecological danger to the Baltic Sea and surroundings, say environmentalists of Green World, an ecological organization based in Sosnovy Bor. Ecologists say tests of pine trees that grow Sosnovy Bor, a town located five kilometers from LAES, showed that “those pine trees had three times as many changes to cell development as similar trees growing 30 kilometers away from the station.This way a pine tree signals to us the unfavorable state of the environment,” Vladimir Zimin, a Green World expert, said, St Petersburg Times reported.
Earlier this month, the Interfax news agency cited a source in the Interior Ministrys Main Directorate for St. Petersburg City as saying that the valves from the Leningrad NPP were stolen. The price of the stolen devices was reported at 700,000 rubles (about $24,000). The Leningrad power plant is not only a top security site, but it is also located in the area close to the Finnish border where the security regime is even stricter.
At the moment three units of Leningrad NPP are running at full capacity, 3,000 MW total. Reactor no.4 was shutdown today for 15-day maintenance.
What’s wrong with Russia’s official documents on the Arctic.
As uranium supplies from Russia fall under the shadow of potential sanctions, and while Ukraine’s allies look to wean themselves off nuclear fuel produced by Moscow’s Rosatom corporation, owners of left-for-dead mines in the US are looking to revive their deposits.
The European Union doubled its purchases of Russian nuclear fuel in 2023, data from Eurostat and the UN’s international trade service Comtrade show.
The output of Russian nuclear power plants in 2023 decreased by 2.8% compared to 2022. A decrease in output occurred for the first time in 10 years a...