The Arctic as a resource base
What’s wrong with Russia’s official documents on the Arctic.
News
Publish date: May 31, 1999
Written by: Igor Kudrik
News
This year’s second train laden with spent nuclear fuel left Murmansk last week.
Spent fuel shipment |
The nuclear train arrived to Murmansk around mid May to ship spent fuel to Mayak plant in Siberia for reprocessing. The train was in early April in Severodvinsk, Archangel County, to pick up a load of spent fuel from nuclear submarines.
Four TUK-18 type railway cars were loaded at the Atomflot base for nuclear powered icebreakers in the suburb of Murmansk. This time, however, the train did not take any civilian spent fuel. The fuel loaded comes from the Northern Fleet. A part of the fuel was taken from the storage onboard civilian service vessel, the Lotta, and a part from the naval service vessel, PM-12 (Malina class), which arrived to Murmansk earlier this month for that purpose.
This is the second shipment of spent fuel to Mayak plant so far this year. No further shipment schedules are known. Officials from Murmansk Shipping Company, which operates icebreaker fleet and manages fuel shipment from the Kola Peninsula, says that future plans would depend upon funding from Moscow.
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...