Welcome address to the participants of the International Public Dialogue-Forum and Exhibition AtomEco 2017

Greetings, guests and participants of the International Public Dialogue-Forum and Exhibition AtomEco 2017!

This year has been declared the Year of Ecology in Russia. And we welcome it because we have a long and solid history of participation in environmental protection projects and we consider the development of this activity to be critically important. This year alone we will implement environmental projects amounting to 23 billion rubles.

I should note the most important projects of this year – the beginning of exportation of spent nuclear fuel from Andreev Bay in Murmansk region and a project to clean Kola Bay of sunken and submerged objects that negatively affect the waterways. Another Russian region, Kamchatka, is also a Rosatom project site, where activities to remove decommissioned nuclear submarines and nuclear maintenance ships from the region are consistently implemented. This work should be completed by 2019.

Even with the end of the Year of Ecology, our work in this sphere will not come to an end. We are planning ambitious projects, such as safe decommissioning of facilities considered a potential threat for environmental pollution, digitalization of environmental monitoring, and development of contaminated site reclamation technology.

Over the years of environmental protection and clean-up work, we have created a unique technological base for improving the environmental situation in different spheres. We learned how to tackle very serious challenges. And now we are ready and intend to share our capabilities, to offer technological solutions to the most sensitive issues, such as: cautious development of the Arctic, reclamation of contaminated areas, safe treatment of industrial waste, and many other challenges.

Ecology is what brings the world together, and we are as open as possible to all joint projects in this area.

Special attention should be paid to maintaining an acceptable ecological balance. Nuclear energy in particular makes a significant contribution here. Today global nuclear generation prevents about 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide from release into the atmosphere, which corresponds to the volume that all the world's forests absorb each year. And taking into account the rate of construction and commissioning of new nuclear power plants around the globe, this figure will be even higher. Rosatom will play a leading role in this. And we're used to such responsibility: scale has always been a distinctive feature of the Russian nuclear industry!

I am confident that AtomEco 2017 will become not only an effective platform for discussion of Rosatom's results in nuclear, radiation and environmental safety, but will also let us identify new challenges together with the general public and scientific organizations and, most importantly, identify new mechanisms for cooperation and extension of the boundaries for collaboration in the entire range of projects for a healthy environment.

I wish all guests and participants of the AtomEco 2017 productive work in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and successful achievement of our objective – making the planet cleaner and better!

Alexey Likhachev
Director General, State Atomic Energy Corporation ROSATOM