nuclear-news

First load of nuclear waste from Andreeva Bay arrives in Mayak

 https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2017/08/first-load-nuclear-waste-andreeva-bay-arrives-mayak, Now starts the reprocessing of Russia’s Arctic Cold War-era legacy next door the the plant where Stalin’s first nuclear bomb was made. Thomas Nilsen, August 17, 2017 

The train carrying the first containers with spent nuclear fuel from the Northern Fleet’s rundown storage facility on the Kola Peninsula arrived on August 14, the information portal of Mayak informs.

Mayak is the enterprise in the closed town of Ozyorsk in the South-Urals where Russia’s only reprocessing plant for spent nuclear fuel is located.

Formerly known under the code-name Chelyabinsk-65, the secret town was the birthplace of Josef Stalin’s nuclear weapon program with several plutonium production reactors and processing plant for nuclear warheads material. Nowadays, the plutonium extracted from the reprocessing plant, is stored and could possible be used for so-called MOX-fuel, a mixture of uranium and plutonium for civilian nuclear power reactors.

The reprocessing plant to handle the fuel elements from Andreeva Bay storage, named RT-1, was first opened in 1977. From the early 1980ties, after Andreeva Bay stoped to receive more spent nuclear fuel from submarines, all uranium elements from the Northern Fleet and the Murmansk based fleet of civilian nuclear icebreakers were sent to the Mayak plant by train, from Murmansk and from Severodvinsk.

On June 27, the first batch with 470 spent fuel elements left Andreeva Bay. On the quay were both Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Børge Brende and Rosatom’s Director General Alexei Likhachev.

August 18, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia, wastes