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              Russia is one of the major players in the global nuclear industry. They are building nuclear reactors for domestic use and export. They are also conducting a great deal of research on nuclear reactor design and advanced nuclear fuels. TVEL is the nuclear fuel subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear corporation. They are working on what they call a “dual-component” approach to closing the nuclear fuel cycle. They are also working on accident-tolerant fuel (ATF) and innovations in fuel for their VVER reactors.
       Last year, Russia laid out a hundred-year plan for the use of nuclear reactors. This plan is based on fast neutron reactors and thermal neutron reactors. TVEL is working on mixed-oxide fuel and REMIX fuel which both use recycled uranium mixed together with plutonium. They call this “dual-component.”
       Konstantin Vergazov is TVEL’s senior vice-president for Science, Technology and Quality. He said, "We're very actively engaged in this and right now it is cost-intensive. That's just the first stage, but in the future, once we've involved plutonium and regenerated uranium into the fuel cycle, then the fuel cost of electric power production will decrease.” Rosatom plans to launch commercial fast neutron reactors first. "No other country currently has such technology in operation," Vergazov said. "At the Siberian Chemical Combine [SCC] site, in Seversk, we’re building a demonstration centre, a reactor installation, a facility for recycling used nuclear fuel and a shop floor for fabrication of nuclear fuel for the fast reactor. This is an R&D investment project and once we obtain the results we’ll apply them all over the world in the nuclear market, but we’ll start in Russia first."
       The site is "at a high stage of readiness", he said. "All the necessary equipment for that fuel fabrication facility has been purchased and delivered to the site. The next stage will be to build the fast neutron reactor BREST-OD-300."
       The BREST-OD-300 lead-cooled fast-neutron reactor is part of Rosatom's Breakthrough project to enable a closed nuclear fuel cycle. The ultimate goal of the project is the elimination of radioactive waste from nuclear power production. The Breakthrough project combines a fuel production/refabrication module to produce dense uranium plutonium fuel for fast reactors, a nuclear power plant based on a BREST reactor and a used fuel retreatment module.
       In December of 2018, TVEL began batch production of MOX fuel for the BN-800 fast neutron reactor. Vergazov said, “But these are the first steps in a long journey. To build a commercial fast reactor is unique in the global nuclear industry and to build a new shop floor for batch production of MOX fuel means a certain amount of investment. But as our strategy is looking 50 to 100 years ahead we are ready to invest today in order to pick the fruits in the future. The strategy is based on saving costs for nuclear fuel because by incorporating plutonium and recycled uranium in the nuclear fuel cycle we save raw materials and gain economic efficiency. And we will also reprocess the nuclear waste from thermal neutron reactors - from VVER units - to obtain fuel for fast neutron reactors.”
Please read Part 2