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Work on documentation for Leader ice-breaker to take 18 months, construction - 30 months

United Shipbuilding Corporation also plans to earn more than 1.5 billion rubles ($24.84 million) from the sale of its non-core assets in 2017

YEKATERINBURG, July 9. /TASS/. Some 18 months will be needed to develop documentation for the Leader nuclear-power ice-breaker and the construction will take some 30 months more, CEO of Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation (OSK), Alexei Rakhmanov, told TASS on Sunday.

"Work on documentation will take 18 months and construction - two and a half years," he said on the sidelines of the opening ceremony of the Innoprom-2017 international industrial exhibition.

The project of a new icebreaker with a capacity of 120 megawatt is currently been looked at with an eye of possible implementation. Currently, the world’s most powerful icebreaker LK-60 (60 megawatt) is being built at the Baltic Plant (incorporated into OSK).

"The Leader icebreaker, as a matter of fact, is an enlarged modification of the LK-60. So, we understand what is to be done about it, both in moral, physical and practical terms," Rakhmanov noted.

The Leader icebreaker is to be the world’s only icebreaker capable of year-round operation along the Northern Sea Route in conditions of ice thickness of more than four meters. According to earlier reports, the project cost may reach 70 billion rubles (1.159 billion U.S. dollars).

OSK also plans to earn more than 1.5 billion rubles ($24.84 million) from the sale of its non-core assets in 2017, Rakhmanov told TASS. "The sum this year is not big. But the task is [to earn] more than 1.5 billion rubles," he said on the sidelines of the opening ceremony of the Innoprom-2017 international industrial exhibition.

Several year ago, the corporation set a task to sell its non-core assets. Rakhmanov however said it was not an easy to task to find a potential buyer for such assets. "They are mostly unrealizable assets, ‘abandoned’ investments no one needs. In some cases, the market price is below the book price. It creates a dilemma," he explained.

He refrained from forecasting OSK’s financial standings in 2017, saying only that a number of orders had been adjourned from 2016 to 2017 to automatically delay other projects.

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