Belarusian nuclear station fully staffed by late 2016

All the personnel for the Belarusian nuclear power plant will be hired by late 2016. The statement was made by Belarusian Deputy Energy Minister Mikhail Mikhadyuk at the online conference hosted by the BelTA website on 23 October.

People for future executive positions in the main departments of the nuclear power plant have been hired so far.

A government program is in progress to train personnel for the Belarusian nuclear energy industry in 2008-2010. The document focuses on several areas. One of them is training specialists in universities. New departments have been opened in four Belarusian universities lately. “Yesterday at a meeting with the Head of the Physics Department of the Belarusian State University we talked to the students, who will graduate next year. And we determined which ones will be hired to operate the nuclear station. The same work has been done in the Belarusian National Technical University and other universities,” explained Mikhail Mikhadyuk.

Apart from that, the personnel now employed at conventional cogeneration plants are being retrained. “Nuclear power plants use a lot of equipment employed by heat power plants,” noted the Deputy Energy Ministry. Mikhail Mikhadyuk added that work was in progress to select specialists and send them for training in the relevant educational centers of Russia and Ukraine. The relevant arrangements had been made with these countries already, he said.

The new nuclear power plant will also use specialists with experience of operating a nuclear power plant. In particular, personnel of Lithuania’s Ignalina nuclear power plant will be hired.

According to Mikhail Mikhadyuk, in 2013 or in early 2014 they will begin building a training center that will feature a full-scale simulator for the sake of training nuclear station personnel. Highly qualified trainers with the necessary experience will operate the center.