Photo from UNIAN
Ukraine borrowed US$250 million to build the facility.
The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a self-sustaining U.S. government agency, which, together with the Central Storage Safety Project Trust, provides loan funds for the construction of the Centralized Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel (CSFSF), has praised the scale of work at the construction site in Kyiv region.
"I am pleasantly surprised by the scale of the actual work performed at the construction site of the Centralized Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel," SE NNEGC Energoatom's press service quoted Vice President and General Counsel at OPIC William Doffermyre as saying.
Read alsoUkraine in Jan buys nuclear fuel from Russia alone
The inspection was designed to monitor how Ukraine implements agreements on borrowing US$250 million and financing the construction of the Ukrainian-based nuclear storage facility between Energoatom and the Central Storage Safety Project Trust. They also monitored the implementation of a guarantee agreement concluded between Ukraine's Finance Ministry, OPIC and the Central Storage Safety Project Trust on the basis of an inspection of the project's implementation.
"During the trip to the construction site, I saw NNEGC Energoatom and Ukraine are really interested in this project and fulfill all their obligations. I can confidently say that it was the right decision made by OPIC to financially support the CSFSF project and Ukraine," Doffermyre was quoted as saying.
During their inspection visit, the delegates discussed a number of issues, namely the schedule, project management processes, including contract management and subcontracts; quality of construction, the state of coordination of the relevant regulatory framework at the level of the government of Ukraine, as well as the status of the testing of Holtec equipment at nuclear facilities in Ukraine.
As reported by UNIAN, early in June 2017, Ukraine's government approved a project for the construction of a Centralized Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel. Using this advanced storage technology, Holtec International will safely store nuclear fuel from Ukraine's Rivne, Khmelnytsky and Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plants for 100 years. Since 2001, Zaporizhia NPP has been using a local storage of spent nuclear fuel. As Ukraine has no storage facility now, it has to spend about US$200 million every year to pay for the removal and processing of spent nuclear fuel in Russia.
In December 2017, Energoatom, together with the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine, signed a loan agreement with OPIC and the Central Storage Safety Project Trust for US$250 million, which will be used for the construction of the Central Storage Facility.