Belarusian lawmakers approve spent nuclear fuel deal with Russia

MINSK, April 18 – RIA Novosti. On Tuesday, Belarusian parliamentarians passed a draft law on the ratification of the intergovernmental agreement with the Russian Federation on the management of spent nuclear fuel, as reported by RIA Novosti correspondent.

For the ratification bill to go into effect, it must be approved by the upper house of the Belarusian parliament and signed by the president.

Russia and Belarus signed an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the field of spent nuclear fuel management and the procedure for its return to the Russian Federation for reprocessing, at the Atomexpo-2022 forum in Sochi, in November. The document was signed by the state company Rosatom Alexei Likhachev and the Minister of Energy of Belarus Viktor Karankevich.

The document establishes a mechanism for the import into Russia of irradiated fuel batches of nuclear reactors for temporary storage, along with the subsequent processing and isolation of valuable materials, including nuclear energy, as well as the return of radioactive waste to Belarus.

The practice of returning spent (irradiated) nuclear fuel to Russia exists in all countries where nuclear power plant reactors built according to Russian designs are operated.