Mikhadyuk: Ostrovets site was chosen for its safety

The Ostrovets site was chosen to build the Belarusian NPP for safety reasons, Deputy Energy Minister of Belarus Mikhail Mikhadyuk told reporters on 17 August during Belarus-Lithuania public hearings on the report on environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the Belarusian NPP in Ostrovets, BelTA has learnt.

Initially two more sites located in Mogilev Oblast were considered, but sinkholes were detected there. “Today the international community has no clear-cut methods to prevent possible issues associated with construction of nuclear power plants at such sites; neither has it engineering solutions to avoid problems afterwards. The expected soil-bearing load of the NPP will be felt at the depth of 75 meters; at those sites sinkholes were found at the depth of 35 meters and they were watered,” the Deputy Energy Minister said. He informed that two institutions, namely the Vedeneyev All-Russia Scientific Research Hydraulic-Engineering Institute and Kievatomproyekt from Ukraine, strongly advised against those construction sites and recommended the Ostrovets site because it was the safest one from the point of view of the stability of the earth crust there.

The Deputy Energy Minister was surprised to find out that representatives of Lithuanian mass media and the public with who he talked on the sidelines of the hearings were not aware of this information. “It was long ago that we submitted this information to Lithuanian officials asking them to forward this information to the public and government agencies. It seems like they ignored our request. Not everything we officially sent to Lithuania was made public,” Mikhail Mikhadyuk said.

He referred to the Rovno NPP in Ukraine as an example of the wrong choice of the construction site that disregarded sinkholes. Forty years after the construction of the NPP, construction workers still pump reinforced concrete in the place where the major installations were built to avoid negative consequences.