OREANDA-NEWS. December 7, 2011. On December 6, the III International Nuclear Industry Suppliers’ Forum ATOMEX 2011 opened in Moscow’s World Trade Center.

The event is organized by ROSATOM.

Goals of the forum are attraction of new suppliers to the nuclear industry, improvement of quality of purchased equipment and services, ensuring transparency of procurement procedures, development of competition, improvement of investment efficiency during construction and operation of nuclear industry facilities.

On the first day of the forum the participants of the event were addressed by Sergey Kirienko, Director General of ROSATOM. In his address he, in particular, noted: “After the tragic events at Fukushima Daiichi NPP there were pessimistic forecasts that the accident would question the further development of nuclear power. But six months have passed and those forecasts have not been proved true.”

Kirienko emphasized that, as compared with last February when ROSATOM’s order portfolio had counted 12 power units, a power unit in Iran was commissioned, now the outstanding portfolio of signed contracts and agreements included 21 power units. The customer-countries include China, India, and new countries, such as Belarus, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Kirienko stressed that after the events at Fukushima Daiichi, competitiveness of Russian NPPs has increased. Russian designs of NPPs which are offered, meet the requirements of having reference units; exerts have acknowledged Tianwan NPP in China the world’s safety and most successful plant in China. Russian NPPs meet current safety requirements: they must withstand extreme situations, such as those at Fukushima Daiichi. In addition, they withstand an aircraft crash, have a passive heat removal system which maintains the plant safe even in a blackout, and they have a core melt trap.

“A volume of orders has not decreased but even increased in the area of NFC. Techsnabexport has a history record volume of contracts,” Kirienko said.

He also said that priorities of the procurement system were reliability, safety and quality; and only under these terms price was reduced. “An outcome of the 9-month work in 2011 is RUB17.4 billion that is comparable with results of 2010. A number of open tenders have nearly doubled as compared to the last year: from 24,000 in 2010 up to 46,000 this year. Purchases made through open tenders only were RUB370bn just for 9 months of 2011,” Kirienko emphasized.

Kirill Komarov, Deputy Director General and Director of the Development and International Business Bloc of ROSATOM, addressed the audience at the opening ceremony. He noted a positive trend of yearly expansion of the forum, which exhibition space doubled in 2011 and a number of delegates are continuously growing.

This year the forum is attended by more than 650 representatives of 300 Russian and foreign nuclear industry companies. The exhibition space houses 120 participating companies.

The International Nuclear Industry Suppliers’ Forum ATOMEX is held already for the third time. The conference partner is Sberbank of Russia; the partner of the section session “Engineering researches, designing and construction of facilities using nuclear energy” is SOGAZ Insurance Group; the partner of the section session “Management systems on projects of facilities using nuclear energy construction. Information technologies” is SAP. The technical sponsor is ENERGOGARANT IC.

The forum will continue until 8 December 2011.