Expert: Russian solutions for Belarus’ NPP are the right choice

It was right to choose Russian technologies for the construction of the Belarusian nuclear power plant, Director of the Nuclear Energy Department of the Energy Ministry of the Republic of Belarus Nikolai Grusha said on 22 March during an online conference on the BelTA website.

He noted that the choice of the supplier was the second most important thing after the choice of the NPP location. “We were unbiased; we analyzed existing nuclear power plants, new projects, and new designs. We could not seriously consider nuclear power plants designed in the 1970s or early 1980s,” the expert said. “Taking into consideration the toughening nuclear safety requirements, it made little sense to construct a “two-and-a-half” generation nuclear power plant suggested by China,” Nikolai Grusha said. He noted that such a plant had to be upgraded soon afterwards.

He reminded that when Belarus had to make a choice, there were few new projects. Belarus considered designs offered by a company from the United States, a French-German group and a Russian company. “In terms of technical specifications, the Russian designs could rival foreign ones and were even better in terms of the combination of active and passive security systems and many other parameters,” Nikolai Grusha said.

The expert believes that the language barrier is quite an issue, too. “There are tonnes of instructions. It is important to be able to speak the same language as the supplier of technologies. The technical staff does not know English well enough to be able to adequately respond to an emergency,” Nikolai Grusha said. In his view, it was much easier to provide training in the Russian language, therefore the choice in favor of the Russian company was the right one.