Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership





"The Barents Sea area is the largest repository of nuclear waste in the world."

The NDEP's nuclear waste challenge

Spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste in north-west Russia, mainly generated by the Russian Northern Fleet, present a legacy of dangerous environmental hazards on an international scale. The Barents Sea area is the largest repository of nuclear waste in the world. Existing facilities for the management of nuclear waste are obsolete and more than fully used. Some of them leak radioactive material to the environment.

The current facilities were not designed for the gigantic task of supporting the decommissioning of the ageing Soviet nuclear fleet. Efforts must be directed towards radically improving the legacy of accumulated waste is managed as well as facilitating present and future decommissioning and de-fuelling of nuclear propelled vessels.

The Russian Federation has 250 submarines, warships and icebreakers, containing over 450 naval nuclear reactors. The size of the nuclear fleet has been reduced, withdrawing approximately 140 submarines, surface ships, support and maintenance vessels from service in the Northwest region of Russia. This has resulted in significant amounts of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste accumulated in poor storage conditions in the region, causing considerable concern about risk to workers, local populations and environment.

In selecting nuclear waste projects in north-west Russia for financing, the NDEP has established some key criteria. Projects should:

  • be in line with Russian priorities,

  • be sufficiently funded from the start,

  • be selected to fit in an integrated, holistic approach; all steps to be taken to the eventual disposal of the radioactive material need to be established in the beginning of the process,

  • build on the experience of existing bilateral programs and the work of the Contact Expert Group under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and

  • be in line with international practice and rely on the effective work by locally based Project Management Units (PMUs) with Russian and international experts.

The EBRD is the lead bank for managing the NDEP’s nuclear waste projects. The government of the Russian Federation has declared its full agreement with this approach, which was presented by the EBRD.

With the Bodö Declaration of March 1999, in the Barents Euro Arctic context, Western donors started a process to create a multilateral legal framework that would fix the conditions under which all interested countries could provide assistance to the Russian Federation on nuclear-related activities.

The Multilateral Nuclear Environmental Programme in the Russian Federation (MNEPR) signed on 21 May 2003 between the western donors and the Russian Federtaion has created an official framework for addressing the most important legal questions associated with western assistance in the Russian Federation, in particular access to sites, tax exemption and liability. The completion of the MNEPR Agreement was a pre-condition for entering into NDEP grant agreements for nuclear waste projects and served as a trigger point to start the activities under the nuclear window of the NDEP.

The initial task of the nuclear window of the NDEP was to develop, together with the Russian Federation Authorities and a group of independent international experts, a Strategic Master Plan (SMP). The SMP is emerging as a comprehensive and harmonised work programme for the overall decommissioning of nuclear submarines and service vessels, for the management of spent fuel and waste and finally for the environmental rehabilitation of the north-west Russia.

The implementation of the SMP will have significant and complex environmental impacts and thus a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is being carried out concurrently to the development of the SMP. The purpose of the SEA is to ensure that the environmental consequences of the SMP are identified and assessed before its implementation goes ahead. By reporting on key environmental, health and safety and social implications, the SEA provides the environmental dimension to the technical SMP and increases its transparency through public consultation process which follows it.

To read more on the NDEP nuclear window, check the EBRD website and NDEP news section.