UrBC, Yekaterinburg, February 11, 2019. Rosatom’s Chelyabinsk Region-based member enterprise Mayak Production Association intends to start recycling Beloyarskaya Nuclear Power Station’s spent fuel in 2024, Vestnik Mayaka refers to the company’s Director-General Mikhail Pokhlebayev as stating.

Now the spent fuel coming from Beloyarskaya Nuclear Power Station’s oldest AMB 100 and AMB 200 reactor-based power-generating units started entering Mayak as early as 2017. This was the key factor in getting these power-generating units finally decommissioned after they got shut down in 1981 and 1989. The project is vital to maintaining the atomic industry’s nuclear radiation safety. A unique spent fuel recycling facility is now being put up on Mayak’s premises.

‘The plant has been storing more than 100,000 kg of AMB spent nuclear fuel assembly units (Atom Mirny Bolshoi; 14-meter-long SFA units- ed. note) from Beloyarskaya Nuclear Power Station since the eighties. To make sure Rosenergoatom can get the station’s two earliest power-generating units decommissioned, the AMB reactor-generated spent nuclear fuel needs to get taken here. We’ll keep working on this in 2019. We’ve also received the necessary funds to put up a special department where the SFAs will get segmented and placed into canisters. We’ll start recycling the AMB reactor-generated spent nuclear fuel in 2024,’ M. Pokhlebayev says.