MOSCOW, December 4. /TASS/. Rosatom has begun eliminating temporary storage facilities for radioactive waste.
According to the nuclear industry newspaper Strana Rosatom, from now on the waste will go straight to permanent isolation facilities for the entire period it will remain a potential hazard.
For many decades, the newspaper writes, radioactive waste was a deferred problem. Storing them safely and securely was the paramount task, while disposing them once and for all would be the business of future generations, it was generally believed.
"The network of temporary storage sites began to be perceived as something permanent. Now this once remote prospect has become a reality: the industrial operator responsible for handling the nuclear legacy facilities, Radon (a Rosatom enterprise - TASS) is beginning to decommission these facilities, to extract and transfer all radioactive materials to the National Operator for RAW Management (a Rosatom enterprise - TASS), which, in accordance with the federal law, will deposit them into final isolation facilities for the entire period the waste remains hazardous," the article reads.
For now, Russia has only one such permanent facility - in Novouralsk - with a capacity of 55,000 cubic meters. In 2026, other storage facilities will open in Seversk (Tomsk region) and Ozersk (Chelyabinsk Region), and sometime later, in Zheleznogorsk (the Krasnoyarsk Region). First of all, it was decided to eliminate storage facilities that are not included in the territorial plan for the RAW management system development, namely four facilities in the Volga and Urals branches.
As follows from Rosatom's annual report for 2022, the total volume of RAW by the end of 2022 amounted to 5.72·10 to the 8th power cubic meters, including 5.53·10 to the 8th power cubic meters of the accumulated RAW.