Nuclear service ships problem hard to tackle, Murmansk seminar agrees
The seminar late last month, entitled “Problems of decommissioning of nuclear service vessels and the creation of a regional industrial decommissioning centre,” included participants from the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom), design and engineering institutes, the government of the Murmansk Region, ship repairing yards and non-governmental organizations.
“This is a very useful practice,” said Viktor Akhunov, head of Rosatom’s department responsible for decommissioning of Russia’s nuclear sites, referring to the Bellona seminar.
“It is very interesting and important to hear all kinds of opinions. This gives us an opportunity to make the correct choice out of best options available,” Akhunov said in an interview with Bellona Web.
Akhunov’s apparent openness to hearing NGO opinion on matters like decommissioning nuclear service ships represent a departure from his historically sceptical stance toward civil society organizations.
According to Andrei Zolotkov, head of Bellona-Murmansk, the seminar is the “beginning of a route that might take decades to complete.”
Laid up or still in operation in Russia’s Northwest are 72 nuclear service vessels, of which 28 are in dilapidated condition. Many are partly or completely waterlogged. These 28 ships include seven floating spent nuclear fuel (SNF) storage facilities, five specialised tankers, one floating radiation monitoring station and 15 floating storage facilities for liquid radioactive waste (LRW).
“The problem is not just the SNF storage ship Lepse, which keeps in its holds defective nuclear fuel; from Lepse, we will have to move on to Lotta, Imandra and other vessels,” said Zolotkov in reference to other problematic nuclear waste storage and service ships languishing at the Murmank’s nuclear icebreaker base, Atomflot.
SNF storage ships Lepse, Lotta and Imandra are operated by the Murmansk Shipping Company, which also runs Atomflot and its icebreaker fleet.
“Few people have an idea of what a nuclear service vessel is like. Its decommissioning can be much more dangerous than decommissioning a nuclear submarine,” Zolotkov said.
Zolotkov is confident that the most important step for now is to determine the site for the construction of a future radioactive waste repository.
“Without such a burial site, no works on decommissioning nuclear service vessels will ever start,” he said.
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| Viktor Akhunov, head of Russian's top nuclear authority’s Department for Decommissioning of Nuclear Sites. |
| Bellona-Murmansk |
The problematic vessels
According to Akhunov, no works on decommissioning of nuclear service vessels are currently underway as the country lacks specialised centres to handle radioactive waste management.
“I can say absolutely seriously that we will not be decommissioning these vessels today, nor will we in a year, because we are not ready for it,” Akhunov said in his interview. He explained that the process of decommissioning generates large amounts of secondary radioactive waste, which no one – given the current lack of waste management treatment or strategy in the country – has worked out a feasible storage plan for.
In Akhunov’s opinion, the best option for now would be to put such vessels “into dead storage until we have created a regional [industrial decommissioning] centre, which is currently being planned for construction in Saida Bay.”
Akhunov said further that the hold of the floating storage facilities contain highly irradiated absorption rods – that component of a nuclear fuel assembly that controls the nuclear reaction – that are stored in their claddings and for which no safe removal or decommission procedure has yet been devised. Nor are there technological means to reprocess the complex chemical compositions of liquid radioactive waste that will have to be unloaded from the nuclear service vessels.
Some of these ships are foundering and will have to be first made seaworthy before their delivery to a ship repair yard, where they will undergo a technical inspection and a radiation analysis. There are no waterside storage facilities in the region that could accept containers with solid radioactive waste (SRW) or large-size fragments of the would-be decommissioned nuclear service vessels for storage.
Those vessels that have been taken out of operation are carefully protected from even the slightest chance of exposure lest they lose their buoyancy. The ships’ various systems and mechanisms are in such a dilapidated condition that even keeping the vessels afloat carries a multitude of risks. Decommissioning prospects are thwarted by the absence of SRW storage containers in the region, where spent nuclear fuel from Lepse, for instance, could be stored.
Rosatom’s three-stage decommissioning concept
Still, despite the unsolved problems posed by the need to decommission nuclear service vessels, Rosatom has approved a concept of phased decommissioning efforts for such ships. The concept includes three stages.
The first two decommissioning stages will ensure radiation and environmental safety during the storage of these facilities until the time comes to move them for the actual decommissioning process. The third stage envisions secure isolation – or burial – of the SRW that will be generated during nuclear storage vessels’ decommissioning.
But according to Vladimir Mazokin, a representative of the Dollezhal Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering, Russia currently has no suitable centres for collection, temporary storage, industrial reprocessing or long-term isolation of SRW generated during decommissioning. This fact detracts from the credibility of Rosatom’s third planned stage of decommissioning.
Mazokin, added, however, that one nuclear service vessel (PKDS-4) has been decommissioned, and three have undergone conversion (PTB PM-50, SMT Severka, TNT-29).
Mazokin is of the opinion that decommissioning of nuclear service vessels should – if at all possible – take place where they are laid up because their transport involves certain challenges and risks. There are as yet no estimates for the costs of decommissioning of floating storage facilities as no project evaluations or calculations have been carried out.
The Nerpa ship repair yard
The seminar’s participants agreed that nuclear service vessels’ decommissioning has to be managed by facilities that have at their disposal both the relevant infrastructure and experience in cutting up nuclear submarines. Sections removed from nuclear service vessels during the cut-up procedure will – as happens with blocks cut out of submarines – be moved for interim decay storage until radiation levels subside.
The Nerpa ship repair yard is experienced in submarine decommissioning, but there are a number of adjustments to be made at the site before it can start service vessel decommissioning operations. The plant will need, for instanace, to create special capacities to unload defective nuclear fuel, expand the SRW storage area for the conditioning of accumulated radioactive waste, and restructure the LRW management systems, sanitary and security systems and radiation control systems. Other measures have to be taken, such as minimising the decommissioning procudures’ harmful effects on the plant’s staff and the area’s population and environment.
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| The joint Russian-German nuclear decommissioning project in Saida Bay. |
| Bellona Murmansk |
The Russian-German project in Saida Bay
The joint Russian-German nuclear decommissioning project in progress at Saida Bay on Russia’s Kola Peninsula envisions the creation of a shore-based long-term storage facility for the storage of 120 reactor blocks, including all necessary infrastructure. The project is aimed at improving and maintaining the safety of the environment and arranging for the material and technical development of the Russian sites involved in nuclear submarine decommissioning for the smooth and dynamic course of the decommissioning process.
The project also provides for the necessary conditions for the safe management of waste generated during the decommissioning of nuclear submarines in the Russian north.
In July 2006, construction was completed on the first line of the storage complex, which paved the way for the decision to continue the project until 2008.
The complex will keep in storage 58 sections and installations from nuclear service vessels, surface ships and submarines, submarines equipped with 30 reactor compartments (without the SNF), 11 sections of nuclear-powered fleet’s floating storage facilities (without the SNF), sections of steam-generating systems of nuclear-powered icebreakers (without the SNF), three reactor compartments of surface ships (without the SNF), two sections of floating storage facilities, the nuclear storage facility Lepse (with the SNF), and two submarine reactor compartments (with the SNF).
The complex is expected to be fully operational by December 2008.
SRW conditioning and storage centre
The Saida Bay project’s third phase, to be completed by 2014, will see the construction of a regional SRW conditioning and long-term storage centre. This part of the project will be financed by German funds in the amount of EUR 300m.
The centre will manage waste conditioning, interim storage, radiation decontamination and complete removal of residual radioactive materials, radiation control and long-term SRW storage. Such a centre will provide the opportunity to perform complete dismantling and decommissioning of reactor compartments and other SRW.
But the project only accommodates for the manageable solid radioactive waste that is generated while cutting up nuclear-powered vessels or during the remediation of contaminated areas of shoreline storage (around 42,000 square metres), and for the solid radioactive materials that can be moved for management after long-term storage (around 52,000 square metres). Conditioning or storage of waste containing nuclear fuel will be outside its responsibilities.
Positive reflections on public participation
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| A nuclear service vessel: floating radiation monitoring station. |
| Bellona-Murmansk |
“We are satisfied with how the seminar went. Rosatom heard representatives of public organisations and we could see that we agree on a lot of issues,” said Bellona-Murmansk’s director Sergei Zhavoronkin.
The seminar’s participants noted the importance of the issue raised during the discussion.
“Talking to non-profit organisations is very useful and helps us in the decision-making process,” said Akhunov, adding that he thinks Rosatom’s position on decommissioning nuclear service vessels coincides with Bellona’s.
“From the point of view of simple common sense, we need to have consultations with the public, although we are not obliged to [do so] by the law. Our agency intends to do it,” said Akhunov.
