Nikolay Kuzelev, Director General of NIITFA

– The safety system of nuclear power plants has been drastically revised in the past years

Apr 26 is the 23rd anniversary of the accident at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

I think that human factor was the key reason for the Chernobyl accident. At a nuclear power plant everything must be done according to standards. The experiment they planned at Chernobyl was carried out not very accurately and ended in what it ended. But since then RBMK-type reactors have never failed. Huge work has been done to upgrade this type of reactor and to make it much safer.

The safety system of nuclear power plants has been drastically revised in the past years. Today, almost 40% of the money allocated for the construction of a nuclear power plant is spent on safety. Everybody in the world realizes that one must pay for safety. 40% is quite normal figure for any risky sector: nuclear, oil/gas, railway, etc.. We need energy but we also need safe energy.

We have worked very seriously for many years and we continue to work on this type of reactor. After modernization the RBMK reactor of Kursk Nuclear Power Plant has begun to work at a capacity exceeding 100%. It was the first time ever that the capacity of an RBMK reactor had been raised and what much more important was that what we did was absolutely safe. In the last years the safety system of nuclear power plants has been drastically changed. The passive system is absolutely from what we had 23 years ago. The active system is also different.

But the first fruit of the nuclear renaissance is WWER rather than modernized RBMK. And we must continue this work if we want more electricity. Today, the first question asked when a new construction project is started is not “how does this reactor or turbine work?” but “how do they work safely?”