Russia lower their nuclear ambitions

By 2015 Russia will put into operation 20-25% less power capacity than originally had been planned several years ago. This reduction will affect nuclear power plants to a large extent. In the coming 5 years the power of nuclear power plants will be introduced at a level that is 2,5 times less than projected by government plans.

This was reported on 23 March 2010 by the newspaper Vedomosti referring to the Ministry of Energy of Russia.

The DecomAtom network has earlier stated that the plans for new reactors are unrealistic and these new figures show that we were right. There is not enough money for all the reactors. Russia has not not even set aside money for decommissioning of the old reactors. Decommissioning is expensive, and sufficient funding is necessary to carry out the process in a sustainable way.

The change of nuclear plans will affect for example the Leningrad NPP-2 (LNPP-2), built on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, 40 km west of the border of St. Petersburg. This was reported on 24 March 2010 in the Sosnovy Bor newspaper MAYAK with reference to the Director’s Office of the station under construction.

The launch of the first energy bloc LNPP-2 with a VVER-1200 reactor is planned for autumn 2013. The second block’s launch is postponed from 2014 to 2016, the third to 2018, and the fourth to 2019. At the same time the cost of the first two blocks has increased and reached 220 billion rubles (5.5 billion Euros).