Greater efficiency in Russian nuclear power plant maintenance outages saved nearly 180 days last year and enabled 2.9 terawatt hours more electricity to be produced than would otherwise have been possible, Rosenergoatom said yesterday. This amount of electricity is enough to meet the energy demand of, for example, the Smolensk or Tver regions for six months, the company said.

Russian regulator Rostechnadzor has issued an operating licence extension for unit 1 of the Rostov nuclear power plant in southwest Russian to 2031. As of 9 January, the VVER-1000 unit had generated 148.174 terawatt hours of electricity since it started operations in 2001.

Pilot testing of a new ultraviolet wastewater disinfection system has started at the Kola nuclear power plant. For one of the largest consumers of water in the Murmansk Region (more than 1 billion cubic metres annually), the new system will enable disinfection of water without the use of chemicals containing chlorine, Kola NPP said.

Russian regulator Rostechnadzor has issued operating licence extensions to two more nuclear power units, bringing the total number to 27 since 2001. Unit 2 of Bilibino NPP and unit 4 of Novovoronezh NPP are now licensed to operate until the end of 2025 and 2032, respectively, which is six and 13 years longer than their previous licences.

The first Russian-made nuclear fuel assemblies with experimental accident-tolerant fuel rods for commercial reactors have been manufactured and passed acceptance inspection at Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant, a fabrication facility of Rosatom’s fuel manufacturer subsidiary TVEL. The ATF rods are to be loaded into one of the VVER-1000 units at the Rostov nuclear power plant in western Russia in the first quarter of 2020, TVEL said yesterday.

Russian regulator Rostechnadzor has issued a 15-year operating licence extension for unit 2 of the Kola nuclear power plant to 2034. Kola NPP is located 200 km south of Murmansk, on the shore of Lake Imandra. It produces about 60% of the electricity of the Murmansk region.

The floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov was today connected to the grid, generating electricity for the first time in the remote Chaun-Bilibino network in Pevek, in Russia’s Far East. The achievement followed Russian regulator Rostekhnadzor's provision of an operating licence, as well as permission to connect to the northern electricity grid maintained by Chukotenergo JSC. Connecting the plant to Pevek's heat networks will be completed next year.

Russian regulator Rostechnadzor has issued a 15-year operating licence extension for unit 3 of the Smolensk nuclear power plant, the last of three RBMK-1000 reactors at the site in western Russia. The move means the whole plant has permission to operate for a total of 45 years.

France's Orano will supply a second depleted uranium hexafluoride defluorination plant to TVEL's JSC Electrochemical Plant in Zelenogorsk in Russia's Krasnoyarsk Region under a EUR40 million (USD44 million) contract awarded by Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom. The first facility has been in operation at the site for ten years.

A new-generation core catcher has been installed at Kudankulam unit 3 which is currently under construction in India, Russia's AtomStroyExport has announced.

TVEL has announced the suspension of its work to upgrade the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant because Iran fed uranium hexafluoride into two gas centrifuge cascades located in the same room as the cascades meant to be reengineered for stable medical isotope production.

Siberian Chemical Combine has awarded a RUB26.3 billion (USD412 million) contract to Titan-2 for the construction and installation works for the BREST-OD-300 lead-cooled fast neutron reactor facility at its site in Seversk, Russia. SCC is a subsidiary of TVEL, the nuclear fuel manufacturing subsidiary of Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom.