Security & Safety

Nordic-Russian Emergency Preparedness Exercise Will Be First With Joint Activities, Confirms Sweden

By David Dalton
16 August 2018

16 Aug (NucNet): A Nordic-Russian emergency preparedness exercise for a nuclear incident to be held in Sweden in 2019 will be the first such exercise involving joint activities, Sweden’s regulator has said.

SSM told NucNet in an email that Sweden and Russia have previously taken part in each other’s emergency preparedness exercises, but only as observers. SSM said the exercise is “still at the planning stage, both to scope and content”.

Details of the planned exercise were revealed in a report on SSM’s international cooperation in 2017. The report said SSM had attended as an observer a number of emergency preparedness exercises held at the Novovoronezh, Rostov and Beloyarsk nuclear power stations in Russia.

Several hundred joint projects have been implemented between SSM and states that were republics of the Soviet Union. Cooperation was precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and began in 1991, the report said.

The report summarised the results of cooperation in nuclear security, safety and non-proliferation carried out in 2017 with partners in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus and Moldova. Earlier, projects were completed in Kazakhstan, Armenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The report also noted that when 15 new states replaced the USSR, it became “a strenuous task” to ensure that nuclear weapons and former Soviet military and civilian activities in the nuclear field were “channelled into new structures of ownership and responsibility in the successor states”.

“Today, much work still needs to be completed in order to ensure a transition from the old to the new,” the report said.

The report is online in English: https://bit.ly/2mBfXhR

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