As Russian troops poured into Ukraine at the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February last year, alarm was rising at a flagship Kremlin nuclear project in neighboring Belarus, just a short distance from the European Union’s border.
Engineers at Rosatom Corp. preparing a new 1,200-megawatt reactor, which was not yet connected to the power grid, to generate electricity at the Astravets Nuclear Power Plant detected a mysterious and exceedingly rare problem. Resin was seeping into the primary circuit, threatening to seize up critical components, according to internal documents of the Russian state nuclear corporation seen by Bloomberg.
Control rods and fuel assemblies risked being damaged or broken if the problem persisted when uranium atoms began fissioning. In the worst case, according to people familiar with the issue, accumulation of so-called ion-exchange resin, which regulates the purity of water flowing through plant channels and pipes, could impede reactor control, elevating the risk of a meltdown if something went wrong once it was online.
So on February 25, 2022, Rosatom pulled the plug temporarily on its freshly fueled unit in northwest Belarus, delaying its launch.
Nuclear engineers said Rosatom followed safety procedures by interrupting physical startup of the reactor in order to investigate. Still, the issue compounded delays that pushed back commercial operations more than a year.
When the reactor was turned on for the first time in March, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed there were problems to state media. “There were certain shortcomings in the construction,” he said. “The delay is due to our determination to stick to very high safety standards.”
The water contamination incident, which was previously flagged by Lithuanian intelligence, is among a series of issues, including shortages of skilled labor, delayed shipments, and defective supplies, that Rosatom faced in recent years and which have continued in the wake of Putin’s war against Ukraine, according to the documents and interviews with European officials familiar with the assessments.
The unit in Belarus is now online and was commissioned last month. But the earlier problems at the Astravets plant, located just 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, are especially relevant because Belarus was the foreign testbed for a new reactor design that Rosatom is exporting around the world. Similar so-called VVER-1200 units are set to be commissioned in Bangladesh and Turkey over the next 12 months.
Rosatom has a high reputation for technical and scientific credibility and generally delivers projects on time and within budget. The VVER-1200 is the world’s best-selling so-called Generation 3+ reactor, with orders also pouring in from China, Egypt, Hungary, India and Russia. It has multiple passive layers of safety systems, making a meltdown like that which occurred in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986 virtually impossible.
“As a responsible vendor, we consistently strive to ensure that all issues are properly addressed before the plant is connected to the grid and handed over to the client,” Rosatom said in an emailed statement in response to questions. “There have been no major equipment malfunctions or significant deviations of any parameters beyond controlled safety limits. All minor issues inevitable in the context of new nuclear build like everywhere in the world have been addressed during various stages of commissioning and had no impact on the schedule.”
While Rosatom remains the world’s biggest supplier of nuclear fuel and technology, technical documents and government officials suggest trade restrictions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine may have further complicated the company’s ability to manage its sprawling international projects that bring the Kremlin vital revenue and political influence.
Rosatom, which isn’t under sanctions, said trade measures have had no impact on its operations and there have been no significant changes to its procurement strategy.
So on February 25, 2022, Rosatom pulled the plug temporarily on its freshly fueled unit in northwest Belarus, delaying its launch.
Nuclear engineers said Rosatom followed safety procedures by interrupting physical startup of the reactor in order to investigate. Still, the issue compounded delays that pushed back commercial operations more than a year.
When the reactor was turned on for the first time in March, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko confirmed there were problems to state media. “There were certain shortcomings in the construction,” he said. “The delay is due to our determination to stick to very high safety standards.”
The water contamination incident, which was previously flagged by Lithuanian intelligence, is among a series of issues, including shortages of skilled labor, delayed shipments, and defective supplies, that Rosatom faced in recent years and which have continued in the wake of Putin’s war against Ukraine, according to the documents and interviews with European officials familiar with the assessments.
The unit in Belarus is now online and was commissioned last month. But the earlier problems at the Astravets plant, located just 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, are especially relevant because Belarus was the foreign testbed for a new reactor design that Rosatom is exporting around the world. Similar so-called VVER-1200 units are set to be commissioned in Bangladesh and Turkey over the next 12 months.
Rosatom has a high reputation for technical and scientific credibility and generally delivers projects on time and within budget. The VVER-1200 is the world’s best-selling so-called Generation 3+ reactor, with orders also pouring in from China, Egypt, Hungary, India and Russia. It has multiple passive layers of safety systems, making a meltdown like that which occurred in Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986 virtually impossible.
“As a responsible vendor, we consistently strive to ensure that all issues are properly addressed before the plant is connected to the grid and handed over to the client,” Rosatom said in an emailed statement in response to questions. “There have been no major equipment malfunctions or significant deviations of any parameters beyond controlled safety limits. All minor issues inevitable in the context of new nuclear build like everywhere in the world have been addressed during various stages of commissioning and had no impact on the schedule.”
While Rosatom remains the world’s biggest supplier of nuclear fuel and technology, technical documents and government officials suggest trade restrictions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine may have further complicated the company’s ability to manage its sprawling international projects that bring the Kremlin vital revenue and political influence.
Rosatom, which isn’t under sanctions, said trade measures have had no impact on its operations and there have been no significant changes to its procurement strategy.
The cause of the resin contamination remains uncertain and hasn’t been reported to international safety authorities, according to three nuclear engineers with deep knowledge of Russian reactor designs, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information. They said it’s important to learn whether the issue was related to an operational error or system design, so that it’s not repeated in other places where VVER-1200s are being built.
European officials said that Rosatom’s shutdown of the plant’s second unit will have likely resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and lost revenue as it delayed completion of the prestige project for Putin’s Belarusian ally.
Lukashenko inaugurated the Astravets plant’s first unit on Nov. 7, 2020 before all tasks were complete, said the European officials. In the several months that followed the unit was intermittently in maintenance, one of the documents shows. The European officials, all speaking on condition of anonymity, said they worry Rosatom has bitten off more than it can chew, and could look to cut corners in its workload.
Rosatom called that claim “baseless” and said the company “is not just delivering on its projects; we are playing a pivotal role in the global energy transition and the achievement of net zero targets.”
Operators of the Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant didn’t respond to requests for comment. The London-based World Association of Nuclear Operators, the international entity responsible for compiling events that could impact plant safety, didn’t respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment.
Rosatom said it’s not operating the plant and therefore cannot be responsible for liaising with WANO. “We maintain that there have been no reportable events during the commissioning of the plant in general and the second unit in particular,” it said.
Putin isn’t informed about the commissioning and testing of systems at nuclear plants, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov wrote via Telegram in response to a request to comment. “There were no accidents there,” he said.
While Rosatom controls the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeast Ukraine, the company isn’t under sanctions for its involvement in the war. That’s largely because so many atomic plants around the world depend on Rosatom for supplies of nuclear fuel for their reactors. However, sweeping trade restrictions on Russia may be hampering its ability to source some goods and delaying deliveries, the European officials said.
The documents are the first evidence to emerge showing Rosatom ran into labor shortages and supply chain problems at the Belarus plant, which, according to European officials, could impact nuclear safety. They show project managers over a number of years alternately pushing workers to finish jobs quickly while also complaining about persistent delivery of faulty equipment and supply delays, including valves and generators.
In one instance during the years-long project, Rosatom managers lauded welders for connecting critical cooling pipes in a record 69 days. In another, they griped over defective instrumentation and sensory gear delaying work. The reactor was finished amid a shortfall of skilled labor that meant Russia filled only three-quarters of workforce targets for the project and Belarus just two-thirds of posts last year, according to the documents.
Rosatom said that neither multiple IAEA missions, nor its experts observed any shortage of qualified personnel at the Belarus nuclear power plant.
“The instances of faulty or malfunctioning equipment are consistent with global industry averages for the new nuclear build sector,” the company said. “These occurrences are anticipated and are routinely managed as part of our planned quality assurance protocols, with no compromise to safety or operational integrity.”
The Astravets plant has long been a source of worry among Belarus’s neighbors. The Lithuanian government has repeatedly raised concerns about the plant’s operation, and said it poses a nuclear threat to the whole region.
A year before the resin incident, EU officials said Belarus had made progress on addressing key safety concerns following a visit to the site.
Russia’s nuclear trade brings in plenty of money, but that’s not the full measure of its importance to the Kremlin. Every time Rosatom agrees to build a new reactor, it locks in cashflow — and political clout — for potentially decades. It currently has 22 projects under construction in seven countries.
Data show Russia’s nuclear trade increased by a fifth last year, while supplying more than a third of reactor fuel to the US. Together, the construction contracts and fuel supplies are worth tens of billions of dollars for Rosatom.
The Kremlin’s financing largess underpins the company’s dominance. The documents show Russia extended a $10 billion loan, first announced in 2011, at just 3.3% interest with maturity until 2038 to build Belarus’s two reactors, far below conditions offered by vendors in western economies. Also, because of the delays, Russia was obliged to renegotiate the loan to Lukashenko’s government and postpone repayments by a year.
To be sure, Rosatom has a better record than most competitors in completing projects. A year’s delay is minor compared with many of the newest plants in Europe and the US, which have come online decades late and billions of dollars over budget.
And it’s possible the resin leakage wouldn’t have proved fatal. Operational deviations often appear when a reactor is starting up — what nuclear engineers call the front end of the bathtub curve — before power generation reaches equilibrium, according to a senior International Atomic Energy Agency diplomat, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the subject.
Yet the European officials’ assessments and the Rosatom documents suggest the incident was only the tail end of a series of problems at the Belarus plant — including a dropped reactor vessel that had to be replaced and dozens of faulty sensors. The most recent IAEA figures show Astravets’ unit-1 operating at just over half its capacity since coming online, far below the 90% reliability investors expect for choosing nuclear over other low-emission technologies.
Rosatom’s perceived failure to fully explain the causes and consequences of the incidents have raised red flags among European authorities.
“Intelligence suggests that Belarus and Rosatom have withheld the information on the incidents that occurred in the Belarus Nuclear Power Plant as well as defects that were identified,” the State Security Department of Lithuania wrote on its website, which also cited the water contamination incident. The experience in Belarus shows Rosatom can’t “ensure reliability and safety of its technologies,” it said.
Internal audits of the Belarus plant and Russia’s progress in building Turkey’s first nuclear power station back up some of the Baltic spy agency’s concerns, according to European officials familiar with those reports.
“We work closely with the IAEA, WANO, international nuclear safety experts, independent regulators and plant operators to ensure that all our reactors meet the highest standards of safety,” Rosatom said. “We categorically deny any speculations about unreported incidents that could compromise the safety and operational integrity of our reactors.”
The $20 billion Akkuyu project, with four VVER-1200 reactors designed to cover a tenth of Turkish electricity demand, has been personally endorsed by Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The documents show Rosatom facing delayed deliveries and struggling in recent months to procure shipments on time of control, instrumentation and back-up power systems, as well as switchgears, boiler parts and compressors for the Turkish plant. The company has also been forced to rely on a small number of new, untested vendors from China and Russia to fill any gaps.
Rosatom said it hadn’t encountered any significant procurement issues for the project. Over 90% of critical components of the plant are manufactured in Russia with no sanctions risks, it said.
Rosatom announced Dec. 12 that it received approval from the Turkish nuclear regulator to generate first power at Akkuyu in 2024. The decision confirms the project met all requirements of Turkish law and international construction standards, Anastasia Zoteeva, general director of Akkuyu Nuclear JSC, said on Rosatom’s Telegram channel.
Startup of Akkuyu’s first unit is up to 323 days behind schedule as of late this summer, an internal audit shows. Under a best-case scenario, it’s six months behind schedule, according to the audit.
Rosatom said it’s on track to meet, and possibly beat, its schedule. Under its agreement with the Turkish government, Akkuyu-1 is scheduled for completion in 2025, the company said.
Observers say international regulators need greater transparency to fully understand the safety consequences of Rosatom’s technical faults in Belarus. In the absence of such information, questions loom over Rosatom’s new VVER-1200 technology.
It’s clear “the problems were serious” in Belarus and Rosatom’s global customers and regulators elsewhere simply “do not know” if the reactor’s issues have been fixed, said Dmitry Gorchakov, an analyst at the Norwegian nuclear watchdog Bellona.
Source: Bloomberg