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CHELYABINSK, Russia - Resident of Muslimovo, in Russia's CHELYABINSK Oblast, will be fully relocated by the end of the year because of nuclear contamination in the village, RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service reports. The ethnic Tatar-populated village and much of the surrounding region was heavily contaminated in 1957 by the infamous explosion at the nearby Mayak nuclear station. Russia's oversight body for nuclear power, the Rosatom Nuclear Energy State Corporation, and CHELYABINSK Oblast authorities agreed on the village's relocation in 2006, and some 690 families have been relocated since then. About 150 families still live there. Local authorities plan to plant trees where the village stood after residents have been fully relocated and the village has been decontaminated by the end of 2009. An estimated 500,000 people have been affected by radiation from Mayak, and large tracts of land have been polluted.

The Norwegian-Russian project on replacing radioactive strontium batteries with solar panels in lighthouses along the White Sea and Barents Sea coast and islands is now completed. In 2009 the project might be adopted in the Baltic Sea. All of the Northern Fleet hydrographical service's 153 lighthouses along the White Sea and Barents Sea coast and islands, have now been modernized to use solar energy as power source, Russian TV company TV21 reports. The radioactive strontium batteries that used to supply these lighthouses with energy have been shipped to the Mayak reprocessing plant in Chelyabinsk, Siberia.

"Preparation work is beginning at the production facility "Mayak" for the establishment of a new production complex. It will be supplying Russian nuclear powerplants with the high-density mixed nitride fuel for fast neutron reactors. Information centre of "Mayak" told RusBusinessNews that the start up of the complex is planned for 2018. The initial capacity will amount to 14 tons of fuel annually. In the future the capacity may increase to 40 tons. The estimated cost of the project is 9 billion roubles. The establishment of the high density fuel production facility is a part of the strategy for the development of Russian nuclear power engineering with the new generation fast neutron reactors. One of these is the power generating unit BN-800 which is being constructed at the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station in the Sverdlovsk Oblast. "