The Economics of the Russian Nuclear Power Industry - Bellona

32remains unclear what can be done then with the SNF already in storage there. The spent fuel willpossibly have to be moved into new storage sites with larger capacity – and so on ad aeternum.Actual expenses on SNF management include capital costs of building and decommissioningspent nuclear fuel storage facilities, as well as current expenses incurred by preparing SNF fortransportation and storage, transporting it, and ensuring required technological conditions at storagefacilities, as well as payroll and remuneration expenses, insurance premiums, etc. The majority of thesecosts are semi‐fixed ones – that is, they do not depend on the amounts of SNF placed into andremaining in storage.Because all of the operations involved in the nuclear fuel cycle are carried out in Russia byRosatom‐owned enterprises, prices at which individual transactions take place between industryparticipants are of little significance. But the overall level of expenses involved in maintaining all ofRosatom entities engaged in the entire fuel cycle chain – from producing fresh nuclear fuel to managingspent fuel and disposing of radioactive waste – could be a source of information of much morerepresentative value.At present, a so‐called “dry” 84 storage facility is being built in Zheleznogorsk; the first line ofconstruction there, to accommodate 5,000 tonnes of spent fuel burnt in RBMK reactors, wascommissioned in 2010. 85 The project cost around RUR 10 billion, but the total cost of the works is ratherdifficult to estimate since the storage facility is being retrofitted from an initially planned SNFreprocessing plant, a decades‐long construction project that started as far back as the 1980s. In theearly 2000s, the SNF storage facility project in Zheleznogorsk was assessed at RUR 15 billion. It is slatedfor completion and commissioning by 2015 and is expected to have a total storage capacity sufficient toaccommodate 38,000 tonnes of spent fuel generated in RBMK and VVER reactors.If we assume that no less than 10,000 tonnes of SNF is being stored today in on‐site NPP storagefacilities, and another 850 tonnes is generated yearly, simple calculations show that the Zheleznogorskfacility will be filled to capacity within 33 years – even if only Russian‐produced SNF is accepted forstorage. However, Russia, as a fresh fuel supplier, is also bound by international obligations to repatriatespent nuclear fuel generated in reactors built by the Soviet Union in other countries – primarily, theformer USSR republics and satellite states; this totals almost 50 nuclear power reactors of the VVER typestill in operation and RBMK reactors that have been shut down.Obviously, the capital costs of building the Zheleznogorsk facility – as well as expenses tied toits subsequent decommissioning and building a new storage facility – should be clearly reflected in thedeductions that nuclear power plants pay for management of spent nuclear fuel generated at theirsites. These deductions should also at the very least be sufficient to cover current operating costsincurred by SNF transportation and storage, insurance, and maintenance of the entire SNF managementinfrastructure.For the purposes of assessing capital construction deductions, which must at the very leastprovide enough funds to recoup the costs of building the SNF storage facility in Krasnoyarsk Region, wewill make the following assumptions for the parameters involved (Table 10):84 The practice of “wet” storage means placing spent nuclear fuel in on‐site cooling ponds, where the fuel isaccommodated in racks kept under water for several years until its radioactivity levels subside. The concept of“dry” storage, on the other hand, suggests loading spent fuel, after at least five years of “wet” storage, into “dry”casks (depending on the design, the casks can be used for both storage and transportation). These are typicallysealed metal cylinders enclosed within a metal or concrete outer shell, either placed horizontally or set verticallyon a concrete pad. (See the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Fact Sheet on Dry Cask Storage of Spent NuclearFuel at http://www.nrc.gov/reading‐rm/doc‐collections/fact‐sheets/dry‐cask‐storage.html). – Translator.85 Vadim Ponomaryov. On the way to safer storage, news story. Ekspert Online, June 8, 2010. (Ponomaryov V.Khranit stanet bezopasnei. Ekspert Online, 08.06.2010, http://expert.ru/2010/06/8/hranit_bezopasno/, inRussian).