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Maiden trip for nuclear waste ship

The "Rossita" has made its first nuclear waste mission.

More than three years after it was built, the nuclear service vessel ”Rossita” for the first time loaded radioactive wastes from a dump site in the Kola Peninsula.

Location

The ”Rossita” spent six days on its mission to the Gremikha base on the northern Murmansk coast where several tons of nuclear wastes were loaded on board. According to Mustafa Kashka, Rosatom chief engineer, all the ship’s ten 20-ton containers were successfully filled with waste materials, and subsequently delivered at the Saida Bay storage site, a press release from state nuclear power company Rosatomflot reads. 

The operation at Gremikha was a test mission and the ship will proceed with the loading of spent nuclear fuel from the Andreeva Bay dump site in 2016, the company informs. 

As previously reported, the building of the ”Rossita” was financed by Italy as part of the G8 Gobal Partnership programme and handed over the Russian state nuclear power company Rosatomflot in August 2011. Since then, the ship has been lying idle at a port in Murmansk.

Until now, Rosatom has used the ageing “Imandra” and ”Serebryanka” service vessels for its transportation of spent nuclear fuel and other nuclear wastes. Today, all spent nuclear fuel is removed from Gremikha, while there are still some 21,000 spent nuclear fuel elements in the run-down storage tanks in Andreeva bay, some 60 kilometers from Russia’s Arctic border to Norway on the coast of the Barents Sea.