A landmark event in the history of the World Association of Nucear Operators (WANO) took place in Desnogorsk. 50 representatives of youth movement from 7 countries – Russia, Armenia, China, Ukraine, Finland, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic - gathered together at the roundtable initiated by the Smolensk NPP.

The highlight of the conference was the establishment of a formal and structured youth movement and the election of its first president. This is the shift head of the Smolensk NPP reactor hall Sergey Sherpaev.

‘Our nuclear power plant has been long associated with the World Association’, Pavel Lubenskiy, the director of the Smolensk NPP, noted. ‘All these years, the nuclear power experts have been working together to extend the safety and reliability potential of the power blocks and exchange their best practices. During the General Assembly in London where we summarized the activities of the international association, we focused primarily on the fact that the industry evolvement highly depends on how professional and responsible the youngsters are, as they will be the ones in charge of reliability, efficiency, and competitive advantages of the nuclear power technologies and how sought-after they are’.

The youth movement in the Moscow WANO Office dates back to 2014. Today, it unites 200 people from 23 primary organizations located in 14 countries. At the forum, the representatives of multiple nuclear power plants told about their experience, the challenges they have faced during the development, and did a technical walkthrough around the power block.

‘This forum has boosted the establishment of a new center of power for youngsters’, Sergey Sherpaev, the shift head of the Smolensk NPP reactor hall, said. ‘We will involve young specialists in taking part in partnership verifications, support missions, benchmarks, organize technical walkthroughs around the stations and around ‘non-nuclear’ facilities, facilitate experience exchange and learning from veterans. The English language has to become our working one. When we have the necessary support from the management, we can be condifent that we succeed in reaching our goals’.

According to the chief inspector of the Smolensk NPP, the point of contact for WANO, Ramil Galiev, the key focus of the youth movement is the safety culture and the safety-oriented leadership. With those benchmarks in mind, it will remain the advocate of the modern safety standards, will successfully present impartial information about the nuclear power to the public and tell about why the nuclear power industry is so important for the social and economic development of the country.

‘This is my first visit to a Russian NPP’, Bai Tao, an engineer from the Tianwan NPP (China), said. ‘I have been very impressed with its scale and the professionalism of its operators as well as how well organized the WANO youth movememtn is at the Smolensk NPP’.

‘The international WANO forum has sparkled interest in making your nuclear power plant better, making it safer’, Manolov Ivaylo, a lead engineer of reactor management at the Kozloduy NPP (Bulgaria), stated. ‘We live in a word of global warming and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so the nuclear power is our only way to preserve the planet without affecting the environment’.