Rosatom: The Lepse floating maintenance base no longer poses a nuclear threat to the Arctic

Murmansk, June 16 - Neftegaz.RU. The service ship Serebryanka delivered 19 spent fuel assemblies contained in caissons aboard the Lepse floating maintenance base to a special Atomflot storage site in Murmansk, thereby completing the final stage of unloading spent nuclear fuel from the Lepse ship.
The fuel assemblies were transported in TUK-18 containers.

The unloading and transport of 19 spent fuel assemblies was funded by the federal budget.
Unloading was carried out at the site of the Nerpa shipyard (a branch of Zvezdochka).

Atomflot personnel are now tasked with offloading the containers and sending the nuclear fuel for reprocessing.
After this, bow large storage package (a hermetically sealed bow-based container) of the floating maintenance base Lepse will be transported to the Sayda-Guba long-term reactor compartment storage facility in 2022, as was previously done for the stern-based container.

Atomflot´s Director General Mustafa Kashka said:

• The story of the disposal of the Lepse floating maintenance base ends [happily] without harm to human health or the environment
• The strong competencies of Rosatomflot personnel have made it possible to solve this critical task efficiently
• To ensure the dismantling of the Lepse floating maintenance base, it was necessary to specially develop [new] technologies and equipment and make innovative decisions

Previously, in July 2020, the Lepse floating maintenance base’s main batch of spent nuclear fuel was unloaded at the Nerpa shipyard.
A total of 620 spent fuel assemblies were extracted and unloaded.