In June the Russian Federation and the European Union will Discuss the Methods of NPPs Stress Tests Applying

Июня 03, 2011

Russian Federation Minister for Energy Sergey Shmatko reported to the journalists. Unfortunately, our experts did not participate, and in the nearest future we will perform the analyses of the methods and we have agreed to organize an expert meeting in June in order to define possible disagreements in stress-tests application”, Shmatko said.

According to him, at the meeting on Wednesday European Commissar Gunter Ettinger informed the Russian part that the application of stress-tests was of voluntary character even for European countries.
The decision to test all the 143 plants located in 14 countries of the European Union was taken in connection with the accident at Fukushima-1 in Japan after the devastating earthquake and tsunami happened on March 11. In spite of the fact that only half the European Union countries possess nuclear plants, the European Union government ordered that the decisions on the tests should be taken on the level of all the 27 European Union countries, because the nuclear safety of separate NPPs is of no concern only to the countries of its location.
Shmatko underlined that Europe did not insist that the methods were used by the boarding states.
Nevertheless, the European Union is interested in development of an agreed approach to the further development of stress-test methods”, the Minister said.
According to Shmatko, the European Union will also take profits if other countries analyze these methods.