The Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Nuclear Supervision (Rostekhnadzor) Commission has arrived at the transpolar NPP and started working on the audit activities. The specialists of the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority of Finland – STUK – have joined the verification as observers.

‘The main goal of the audit is to perform a comprehensive check of how the Kola NPP facilitates nuclear, radiation and technical safety. We hope that the NPP will once again reconfirm its high safety operational standards’, Vladislav Poldyaev, the commission chairman and the head of the Rostekhnadzor’s HQ nuclear power plants inspections, said.

16 specialists made it to the Rostekhnadzor’s commission. 4 STUK experts have arrived at the Kola NPP for the observation mission. The verification is going to take ten days, two of which will involve the Finnish team.

The experts will review the current operations, analyze the working documentation, and take a look at the production facilities in order to come up with an impartial evaluation of how the applicable basic safety regulations and standards are observed at the most northern European NPP.

‘It is very important for us to be a part of these joint verifications. Russia and Finland are close neighbors, so both Russians and Finns are interested in how the Kola NPP works. We would like to thank our Russian counterparts for the top-notch level of trust and transparency’, Tapani Virolainen, the chairman of the Finnish delegation, the deputy director of nuclear power plants supervision at STUK, noted.

An inspection of such kind has already been held at the Kola NPP in 2009. According to Vasiliy Omelchuk, the deputy director at the Rosenergoatom Joint-Stock Company and the director at the Kola NPP, the accumulated international cooperation experience will enable the team to make this audit even more productive with a view to promoting the company’s safety standards further on.