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Belarus powers ahead with nuclear project despite some opposition

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Despite opposition in some quarters, Belarus has become the latest in a growing number of countries using nuclear energy.

Each insist nuclear produces clean, reliable and cost-effective electricity.

The EU supports safe nuclear production and one of the newest plants is in Belarus where the first reactor of the country’s first ever nuclear power plant was connected last year to the national grid and earlier this year started fully-fledged commercial operation.

The Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant, also known as the Astravets plant, will have two operating reactors with a total about 2.4 GW of generation capacity when completed in 2022.

When both units are at full power, the 2382 MWe plant will avoid the emission of more than 14 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year by replacing carbon-intensive fossil fuels generation.

Belarus is considering construction of a second nuclear power plant which would further reduce its dependency on imported fossil fuels and move the country closer to net-zero.

Currently, there are about 443 nuclear power reactors operating in 33 countries, providing about 10% of the world's electricity.

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About 50 power reactors are currently being constructed in 19 countries.

Sama Bilbao y León, Director General of the World Nuclear Association, the international organisation that represents the global nuclear industry, said: “Evidence is mounting that to keep on a sustainable and low-carbon energy path we need to rapidly accelerate the amount of new nuclear capacity built and connected to the grid globally. The 2.4 GW of new nuclear capacity in Belarus will be a vital contribution to achieving this goal.”

The Belarus plant has faced continued opposition from neighbouring Lithuania where officials have voiced concerns about safety.

The Belarusian energy ministry has said the plant when fully operational will supply about one-third of the country’s electricity requirements.

The plant is reportedly costing about $7-10 billion.

Despite concerns by some MEPs, who have mounted a strong lobbying campaign against the Belarusian plant, international watchdogs, such as International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have welcomed project’s completion.

The IAEA team of experts recently has completed a nuclear security advisory mission in Belarus, carried out at the request of the Belarus government. The aim was to review the national security regime for nuclear material and associated facilities and activities and the visit included a review of physical protection measures implemented at the site, security aspects related to the transport of nuclear material and computer security.

The team, which included experts from France, Switzerland and the UK, concluded that Belarus had established a nuclear security regime in compliance with the IAEA’s guidance on the fundamentals of nuclear security. Good practices were identified that can serve as examples to other IAEA Member States to help strengthen their nuclear security activities.

IAEA’s Division of Nuclear Security Director Elena Buglova said: “By hosting an IPPAS mission, Belarus has demonstrated its strong commitment and continuous efforts to enhance its national nuclear security regime. Belarus has also contributed to refining IPPAS methodologies in recent months, in particular by conducting a pilot self-assessment of its nuclear security regime in preparation for the mission.”

The mission was, in fact, the third IPPAS mission hosted by Belarus, following two which took place in 2000 and 2009 respectively.

Despite efforts to offer reassurances, concerns do persist about the safety of the nuclear industry.

French energy expert Jean-Marie Berniolles concedes that accidents at nuclear plants over the years have “deeply changed” Europe’s perception of nuclear plants, “turning what should have been one of the most sustainable electricity generation sources into a lightning rod for criticism”.

He said: “This is proof of an increasingly ideologically tainted viewpoint entirely divorced from scientific facts.”

France is one country that has fallen out of love with the nuclear technology, culminating in the 2015 Act on the energy transition for green growth that envisions the share of nuclear in France’s energy mix to fall to 50% (down from roughly 75%) by 2025.

There are many who argue that this will be impossible to achieve. 

Berniolles says the Belarus plant is “another example of how nuclear safety is leveraged to prevent NPPs from achieving full and timely operability”.

He said, “Although not a member state of the European Union, several MEPS, at the urging of Lithuania, demanded in February 2021 that Belarus suspend the project over supposed safety concerns.”

Such demands continue to be voiced fervently, even after the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group (ENSREG) said that the safety measures at Astravets are squarely in line with European standards. The peer reviewed report – published after extensive site visits and safety evaluations – said that the reactors as well as the NPP’s location are “no cause for concern”.

Indeed, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated in a recent European Parliament hearing that: “We’ve been engaging with Belarus for a long time,” “we are present in the field all the time”, and the IAEA has found “good practices and things to improve but we have not found any reason for that plant not to operate”.

The Belarus plant’s opponents continue to draw comparisons to Chernobyl but Berniolles says that “one of the fundamental lessons gleaned from Chernobyl was that complete core melt-throughs needed to be thoroughly contained”.

“This is usually carried out with a device called a core-catcher, and every VVER-1200 reactor – two of which are in Astravets – is equipped with it. The core-catcher’s cooling system must be able to cool the core debris where a thermal power of about 50 MW is generated during the first days following the nuclear accident. No neutronic excursion occurs under these circumstances, in what is another fundamental difference to Chernobyl. Given that European safety experts have not raised these issues during their analyses of Astravets indicates that there are no problems with these measures,” he added.

He and others note that while Lithuania and some MEPs may have spent years criticising the plant’s safety measures “the fact is that they were never found to be seriously lacking”.

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