Andreeva Bay is a former Soviet naval support base located in the Murmansk region on the Kola Peninsula in the extreme North West of Russia about 40 kilometres from the Norwegian border. The base was established in the early 1960s and was used for storage of both fresh and spent nuclear fuel, as well as solid and liquid radioactive waste arising from nuclear powered submarines and icebreakers.
Now largely derelict, the site remains severely contaminated and holds around 30 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel in extremely poor conditions. This represents one of the world’s largest stockpiles, the majority of which is stored in unsuitable and hazardous conditions in three Dry Storage Units (DSUs) originally built as storage tanks for liquid waste. The lack of infrastructure and knowledge of the site, and high levels of radiation around the current storage areas, have posed a considerable challenge to activities.
A number of donors have been working for several years in close co-operation at Andreeva Bay, including the UK, Norway, Sweden, Italy, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and the European Union’s Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States (TACIS) programme. This collective effort represents a good example of close multilateral cooperation to resolve a complex nuclear legacy problem.
The main focus of the UK’s input has been design and construction of infrastructure for the retrieval of the spent nuclear fuel and the installation of protective shielding to improve the radiological conditions over the DSUs.
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Rosatom (the Russian Federal Agency for Atomic Energy) is expected to commence retrieval of spent nuclear fuel from the DSUs after 2014.
The UK also contributes to the ‘NDEP Nuclear Window’, a special programme of the internationally-funded Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership (NDEP). Managed by the EBRD, the NDEP Nuclear Window provides funding for projects to mitigate the legacy of the operation of nuclear-powered ships and submarines in North West Russia. NDEP will be funding the construction of the spent nuclear fuel handling facility at Andreeva Bay.
The Window complements Russian and bilaterally-funded programmes to decommission nuclear powered vessels, provide safe and secure infrastructure for nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel, and enable environmental rehabilitation of affected sites. More information is available on the NDEP website.
More information on the UK’s work at Andreeva Bay is available in the Global Threat Reduction Programme: annual progress reports in the Reports and Publications section