The Nuclear Energy Information Center inaugurated in Bangladesh

The function on the occasion of the center inauguration in the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Novotheatre was attended by Minister of Science and Technologies of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh Yafesh Osman, Ambassador of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh to the Russian Federation Saiful Hoque, Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the People’s Republic of Bangladesh Alexander Nikolayev, Director of Communications Department of ROSATOM Sergey Novikov, and President of the United Company NIAEP-ASE Valery Limarenko.

Addressing the guests of the ceremony, Yafes Osman stated that the inauguration of the Nuclear Energy Information Center in Dhaka will facilitate nuclear power education of the country’s population. He said he was very glad that such state-of-the-art center has appeared. Now any citizen of Bangladesh can obtain basic knowledge of nuclear, he said, adding that this center was a real proof of effectiveness of the cooperation of the Russian and Bangladeshi specialists.

President of NIAEP-ASE Valery Limarenko said that the Russian party was perfectly aware of the necessity to inform the people of Bangladesh and was ready to share its expertise in public relations with the partners. “We offer the Bangladeshi colleagues our best technologies of working with the public opinion. The information centers have given a good account in Russia; there are 17 such centers already. And now we have come to Bangladesh with a vast experience and the latest and unique developments,” he pointed out.

Employees of the new information center are to educate its guests in the field of nuclear power, build up the positive image of the nuclear industry, promote Russian nuclear technologies and advertise Russian nuclear education. The center’s target audience will be schoolchildren, students, teachers of high schools and universities, public officials and representatives of non-governmental organizations, and mass media. The safety of nuclear power is illustratively demonstrated through a mock-up of the core melt trap (a component of the safety system at Russia’s NPPs) installed in the lobby.

The inauguration of the Nuclear Energy Information Center in Dhaka is a result of implementation of the Memorandum of Intentions signed by ROSATOM and the Ministry of Science and Technologies of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh on June 4, 2012.

The nuclear energy information centers are established in the nuclear enterprise host regions. The first information center was inaugurated in Tomsk in November 2008. Over four years in Russia 17 such centers have been set up and successfully operate in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Smolensk, Saratov, Voronezh, Vladimir, Nizhniy Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Murmansk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Ulyanovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Chelyabinsk, and Kaliningrad. International expansion of the nuclear energy information centers’ network is planned to the countries, which use Russian technologies for building nuclear industry facilities. In 2012 first overseas information centers were inaugurated in Hanoi (Vietnam) and Mersin (Turkey). In 2013 it is planned to start up an information center in Istanbul and in 2014 in Minsk (Belarus).