Norway and Britain to Pay for Decommissioning of Russian Nuclear Submarines

Norway and the UK are ready to finance decommissioning of Russian multi-purpose nuclear submarines at the Zvyozdochka plant in Severodvinsk. This was announced by Torbjorn Norendal, the head of the IAEA Contact Expert Group, at the international seminar on decommissioning multi-purpose nuclear submarines which was held in Severodvinsk.

According to Nadezhda Shcherbinina, Svyozdochka's press secretary, the seminar was attended by least 30 foreign experts from Belgium, Norway, Great Britain, the US, Canada and Italy, as well as around 60 Russian experts and scientists. The seminar was held on the initiative of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry, which believed it was necessary to discuss the problem of decommissioning multi-purpose nuclear submarines, as many of those currently at sea contain unprocessed fuel, which is not only dangerous for the North-West of Russia but for the international community as a whole.

Nikolai Kalistratov, Zvyozdochka's general director, said that the plant had developed a technical decommissioning process: the reactor is removed from the submarine and towed out of the plant's grounds. The remaining metal is then reprocessed. All the equipment used in the process was built using funds supplied by the US and Norway.