This is largely due to a sharp increase in the cost of transporting and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel following a change in the billing policy of Mayak Chemical Combine. Starting from January 1, 1991, Mayak Chemical Combine required full coverage of its expenses.

An overview of the number of special transport trains from 1984 to 2000 is given in the table below:

As may be seen from the table, there was an increase of shipments in the year 2000. There are several reasons for this. The second train built by Norway was taken into operation, CTR obtained permission from the United States Congress to fund the shipment of fuel from 15 decommissioned SSBNs, and finally Minatom used a part of the profit from its sales in the USA of highly enriched uranium to fund the transportation of spent fuel to the Mayak reprocessing plant.

As stated earlier, there are 248 reactor cores currently stored in the Northern Fleet. Even seven train shipments correspond only to 17.5 reactor cores. Even if the were to be increased to 10 trains per year, it will still take more than 25 years to transport all of the fuel to Mayak. On the other hand, the reprocessing facility at Mayak does not have the capacity to accept such amounts of spent fuel. In 2000, the reprocessing line at Mayak was operational for only 25% of the 400-ton per year capacity it was designed for. These kinds of reprocessing goals can only be attained by overhauling and upgrading the reprocessing line.

In addition to this comes spent nuclear fuel that Mayak Chemical Combine is unable to accept for reprocessing, including: