The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which manages the project, said in a statement that the first shipment of six casks of spent fuel assemblies was transported on board the Serebyanka service ship from the Nerpa shipyard, where dismantling work on the Lepse had been carried out, to the port of Murmansk for further handling.
According to the statement, the spent fuel will later be moved for long term storage at the Mayak nuclear facility in the Urals.
The Lepse – built in 1934 and taken out of service in 1988 – held 639 damaged and distorted spent nuclear fuel assemblies which represented a serious threat to the environment. The ship had been used for servicing and refuelling Russian nuclear icebreakers from the early 1960s to the early 1980s.
In 2012, the Lepse was moved to the Nerpa shipyard near Snezhnogorsk, northwest of Murmansk, for dismantling and defuelling.
In September 2018, the EBRD announced it had built a shelter for the defuelling of the vessel intended to create safe conditions to cut out the spent fuel from the onboard storage tanks, transfer the nuclear material into new canisters and transport these for further storage at Mayak.
The EBRD said another five shipments of spent fuel will be completed by mid-2020 ensuring the complete removal of all spent nuclear fuel from the Lepse.
The EBRD said the shelter cost of €23m was financed through the Nuclear Window of the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership Support Fund, an international fund with contributions from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK, and managed by the EBRD.
Other projects financed by the fund are the supply of a system for the handling and transport of 22,000 spent fuel assemblies from the coastal technical base in Andreeva Bay, built in the 1960s to service nuclear submarines of the former Soviet northern fleet, and the removal of spent nuclear fuel from reactors of Papa-class nuclear-powered submarines.
In addition, the EBRD manages six other nuclear decommissioning funds, including the Chernobyl Shelter Fund as the biggest undertaking. The latest fund is the Environmental Remediation Account for Central Asia, established in 2015 to assist the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to remediate some of the most dangerous sites left by uranium production in these countries.
