Evalu.& Dev.of the Techn. basis for ensu

Objective of this project was to enable the RF to solve the problems at the end of the operational life of nuclear installations. Decommissioning of nuclear facilities in the RF shall be performed with adequate regard to health & safety of the public, decommissioning workers and the environment. Therefore decommissioning strategies and national waste policies, funding of decommissioning activities, licensing of decommissioning and determination of responsibilities and duties of all parties involved have to be established in laws, decrees and technical rules.

Specific project objectives were:

• The development of a decommissioning guide with specific requirements and rules for decommissioning and their embedding in the RF licensing system;
• The establishment of an inventory list of RF nuclear installations with priorities of decommissioning activities.

The work is structured in 5 tasks:

• Task 1: Supply of information on policies, regulations and recommendations for decommission of nuclear installations in the EU.
• Task 2: Development of safety principles and criteria relevant to safety of decommissioning in Europe and Russia.
• Task 3: Assistance in development specific requirements for licensing decommissioning activities at Russian Nuclear Facilities.
• Task 4: Familiarisation and training in practice and methods during decommissioning phases.
• Task 5: Preliminary inventory of Russian installations out of service to provide priorities and programmes for decommissioning projects.

The work in the project to evaluate and to develop the technical basis ensuring the safe decommissioning of nuclear facilities leads to the following result and conclusions:
There is a number of problems, which have not been sufficiently worked out technically and legislatively, and thus make difficulties for NPP decommissioning.
They are:

• Lack of normative technical documentation on radio-active waste management and reusable materials handling;
• Non-adequate information security (lack of unified definitions, normative regulations, analysis and use of information for Russian NPP decommissioning -insufficient data base);
• Scientific investigations of special safety problems such as self ignition of graphite are still required, technical concepts and solutions for supervised long storage of different NPP types are not available for feasibility assessment;
• The problems connected with methods and organisation of control of NPP facilities, technical conditions and stability of buildings and structures under supervised long storage are not solved;
• Lack of methodology for economical assessment of NPP decommissioning costs;
• Ecological safety under NPP decommissioning.