Experts: The government puts an end to Ukraine’s nuclear safety
Ukraine risks getting into a scandal with nuclear waste due to the authorities’ attempts to put into operation the Centralized Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel, built at the expense of the United States. This facility, built on the territory of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, was officially opened on the 30th anniversary of independence, but the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate is preventing it from being put into operation, which claims that all technical requirements have not been met.
In response, the government recognized the work of the head of the state inspectorate, Grigory Plachkov, as ineffective and dismissed him.
“We are talking about delaying the issuance of the appropriate permitting license for the operation of the Centralized Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility, built by our American partners. Due to groundless extortion of additional information not provided for by current legislation. In addition, we see a delay in those initiatives that are moving forward to build new blocks. And also – approval of the cadastre of new sites for the construction of new units,” said the Minister of Energy of Ukraine German Galushchenko.
The state inspectorate itself stated pressure from the government.
“Mr. Galushchenko has a direct conflict of interests with the State Nuclear Regulatory Authority. Because the State Nuclear Regulatory Authority controls the implementation of norms and rules in the field of nuclear energy use. And the Ministry of Energy is interested in development, and the faster the better. But the existence of an independent body is a lesson from the Chernobyl accident. And this is written in the conclusions of an international group of specialists that there was no such body in the USSR that would stop this experiment,” emphasized Olga Kosharna, a member of the State Inspectorate for Nuclear Regulation of Ukraine.
Former chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and ex-Deputy Minister of Energy of Ukraine Nikolai Steinberg assures that the launch of the storage facility now puts an end to the country’s nuclear safety.
“All the commands that were made in the Cabinet of Ministers, including the prime minister, and this is not the first outburst under him, put an end to nuclear safety in the country that survived Chernobyl. Publicly, in front of the whole world, my friends have already called me from both the north and the south: “What’s going on here?” This is the destruction of the nuclear safety regime,” Steinberg said on Channel 5.
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