Bilateral meeting for the Conversion of the research reactors

A meeting of experts from the National Nuclear Center RK and representatives of the National Nuclear Security Administration and US national laboratories was held in Almaty. The delegations were headed by Erlan Batyrbekov, Director General of the NNC RK and Brian Wood, Team Leader of the Conversion Office. This event was the next one in a series of meetings between the NNC RK and US DOE representatives regarding conversion of research reactors to LEU fuel. This time, the meeting was initiated to identify future steps for conversion of the IGR research reactor to LEU fuel.

          When greeting, the parties exchanged congratulations to mark the success in completion of the commissioning phase of the IVG.1M reactor with LEU fuel, namely a physical start-up, which allowed the significant improving of the reactor performance. A series of energy start-ups is at its concluding phase, then the IVG.1M reactor with a new core will be ready to continue reactor experiments as part of international projects.      

          The meeting’s participants noted that conversion of the IGR research reactor to LEU fuel was initially seen as a potentially more complicated challenge, requiring the executors to find the best ways to tackle the problems. During the meeting, the experts dwelt at length on the stages of a future work and outlined the next steps to implement the conversion tasks.