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Russia boosting nuclear sales – will take back radioactive wastes

Sergei Kiriyenko, a former prime minister, told reporters there that sales would triple by 2030, to $50 billion annually……Under legislation that might have been more difficult to push through a freer political system, Russia allows the importation of spent nuclear fuel from reactors elsewhere.

Russia Seeks to Build Europe’s Nuclear Plants – NYTimes.com, Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear company, is competing with Westinghouse and Areva of France to build new reactors at the Temelin station in the Czech Republic.By ANDREW E. KRAMER   October 11, 2010 MOSCOW — The Russian nuclear industry has profited handsomely from building reactors in developing countries, including India, China and Iran. Now it is testing the prospect of becoming a major supplier to the European Union, too……..

“Russia is a serious player,” said Marina Alekseyenkova, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, an investment bank in Moscow. From now on, she said, “Russia will be a bidder on every tender, globally; Russia will go everywhere.”

That includes the United States. A subsidiary of Rosatom supplies about 45 percent of the nuclear fuel used by American utilities, created from diluted bomb material under a post-cold-war treaty to discourage proliferation. About 10 percent of all electricity in the United States is generated from this former Russian bomb material.

As a legacy of the cold war, Russia possesses about 40 percent of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity, much more than it needs to service its domestic reactors. Enrichment refers to raising the level of the isotope 235 from about 0.7 percent in natural uranium to 3 percent to 5 percent for civilian reactor fuel.

Rosatom says it intends to increase its share of the global fuel market to 25 percent by 2025, from 17 percent today. The strategy is to make money, but also to leverage the low fuel costs in Russia to win other business. This is done by bundling favorable deals on low-enriched uranium with other services, like reactor construction.

And Rosatom has been promoting another singular advantage, one that also shows the Russians’ peculiarly high comfort level with all things nuclear, even after Chernobyl: a willingness to take nuclear waste off the hands of clients, particularly if they buy Russian reactors…….

After signing a deal in China last month to build two sophisticated reactors that burn plutonium-based fuel, the chief executive of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, a former prime minister, told reporters there that sales would triple by 2030, to $50 billion annually……

Under legislation that might have been more difficult to push through a freer political system, Russia allows the importation of spent nuclear fuel from reactors elsewhere.

Supported by Vladimir V. Putin, the president at that time, it is integral to the policies for global expansion of Russian nuclear sales, because waste disposal can be a major sticking point to approval of new nuclear power plants in other countries.

Russia Seeks to Build Europe’s Nuclear Plants – NYTimes.com

October 12, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Russia | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear wastes, radiation, radioactive, reactors, uranium