News

Russian nuclear oversight body to check federal regulations compliance at several nuke facilities

Publish date: October 22, 2008

Written by: Andrey Ozharovsky

ST. PETERSBURG - Russia’s Federal Service for Environment, Technology and Nuclear Oversight (Rostekhnadzor) chief Nikolai Kutin confirmed a series of planned inspections to check observance of regulations governing spent nuclear fuel shipping at the Kola Peninsula Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), and the physical safety of nuclear material at the Smolenk NPP and the Mayak Chemical, the service’s press service said.

Rotekhnadzor’s report for 2007 admitted that there are problems of accounting and control for nuclear materials at sites owned by Russia’s state nuclear corporation, Rosatom.

“While conducting inspection survey in 2007, discrepancies with passport date were reveal while inspecting the Mayak Chemical Combine. At Mayak, these discrepancies entailed out0moded systems of accountability systems, and at present a modernization is underway,” the service’s 2007 report, which was published this year, reads. Apparetly, the coming inspection will reveal if the largest nuclear complex in Russia has put its accountability system for nuclear materials in order. Mayak deals both with accepting, storing and reprocessing nuclear fuel from Russia’s civilian nuclear power plants, as well as dealing with Russia’s military nuclear complex.

The problems the Kola NPP is having with meeting demands and norms for sending its spent nuclear fuel is something new. It could be that these problems were revealed in the process of reviewing Mayak’s accountability issues, to which spent fuel from the Kola Nuclear Power Plant is sent.

The results of the checks will be published later and possibly included in next year’s Rostekhnadzor report.