In July 2020, ChNPP participated in a joint on-line meeting between the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management (hereinafter referred to as SAUEZM) and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute  (hereinafter referred to as KAERI). The meeting was devoted to a project for establishment of a pilot facility to test the technologies of radioactive concrete treatment and metal foam decontamination.

At the end of September, one more step towards this direction was taken, namely Mr. Serhii Kalashnyk, the SAUEZM Head, and Dr. Won Seok Park, the KAERI President, signed a Memorandum about Technical Cooperation in research and development sphere.

“Agency supports continuously and extensively the international cooperation with partner institutions as only having combined the best world technologies and practices we will be able to implement more efficiently all the tasks we face. Namely these are ChNPP decommissioning and Shelter transformation into an environmentally safe system,” emphasized SAUEZM Head Serhii Kalashnyk.

In the words of Mr. Volodymyr Pieskov, ChNPP Acting Director General, such cooperation for ChNPP is an opportunity to test technologies that in future can be potentially used for the power plant needs in decontamination of radioactively contaminated materials that are produced during ChNPP decommissioning and Shelter transformation into an environmentally safe system.

Further steps in cooperation envisage that a safe work performance programme is mandatory to be developed and it will take into regard all statutory rules, norms and standards of safety and technical contract making.

Read more: KAERI-ChNPP: Cooperation with the Republic of Korea

5 years ago, Korea made a decision to shut down its NPPs, whose lifetime was expiring, and to elaborate a development programme for nuclear power plant decommissioning technologies, and Chornobyl NPP agreed to make it possible to use the unique peculiarities of its industrial site for testing these technologies under real-life conditions.