Executive order on safe construction of Belarusian nuclear station passed

The Belarus government passed executive order No. 133 on 25 February to approve the regulation on organizing and exercising control (oversight) over the safe construction and commissioning of the Belarusian nuclear power plant, the press service of the Belarus government told BelTA.

The document will come into force once it is officially published. The document was adopted in line with Belarus president decree No. 62 of 16 February.

The regulation determines the procedure that oversight agencies will have to follow to ensure the safe construction and commissioning of the Belarusian nuclear power plant. In particular, the document provides for two kinds of audits — complex ones and constant monitoring ones.

The complex audits will have to be organized by the Emergencies Ministry in accordance with the schedule for building the nuclear power plant and upon proposals of oversight agencies. The audits may not take longer than 30 business days. However, the term can be extended for the sake of clarifying results and carrying out tests, examinations, and trials by another 30 days at most.

Belarus president decree No. 62 of 16 February has been signed for the sake of reaching and maintaining the proper level of safety of the Belarusian nuclear power plant and for the sake of honoring the commitments Belarus has accepted within the framework of the Convention on Nuclear Safety of 17 June 1994.

The decree specifies that control over the construction and commissioning of the nuclear power plant will be exercised by government agencies, including the State Standardization Committee, the Civil Engineering Control and Oversight Department and its specialized inspectorate, state metrological oversight agencies, the Healthcare Ministry, the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Ministry, the Interior Ministry, and the Emergencies Ministry, including the Nuclear and Radiation Safety Department and the Safe Industrial Practices Department. The Emergencies Ministry will be in charge of coordinating the interaction of the auditing agencies.

The Belarusian nuclear power plant is a project to build an AES-2006 type nuclear power plant 18km away from Ostrovets, Grodno Oblast. The power plant will have two power-generating units with the total output capacity of up to 2,400MW (2x1,200MW). The Russian merged company OAO NIAEP – ZAO ASE is the general designer and the general contractor of the project. In line with the general contract for building the nuclear power plant the first power-generating unit is scheduled for commissioning in 2018, with the second one to go online in 2020.