A €450 million deal was signed on Monday with Russia’s uranium fuel producer TVEL, a subsidiary of state-owned nuclear corporate Rosatom, YLE reports. According to the deal, Pyhäjoki nuclear power plant (NPP) will get its uranium fuel supply from Russia for a ten year period.
The reactor to be built, and ready to start operation by 2024, is also of Russian design, as previously reported by BarentsObserver.
Pyhäjoki NPP is located south of Oulu in northern Finland and will be the second nuclear power plant in the Barents Region after Kola NPP near the city of Polyarny Zori.
Under Finnish law, all spent nuclear fuel and other high-level waste must be disposed of in Finland. The country’s disposal facility, currently under construction in the south, is not designed with a capacity to include spent nuclear fuel from Pyhäjoki, but only limited to Finland’s three other nuclear power plants.
Until the early 90ies, Finland exported all its spent nuclear fuel to Russia’s Mayak reprocessing facility in the South-Urals. This export was halted after it became known for the public that the areas around Mayak were severely radioactive contaminated.
Fennovoima has, according to YLE, yet to explain how it plans to handle its spent nuclear fuel. On its web-portal, the company says electricity price of €50/MWh will include all production costs, including waste management.
