---
title: "Russia Builds Reactors Abroad While the Bill for Its Old Ones Comes Due"
description: "Rosenergoatom’s own estimates put its decommissioning shortfall at €18.7bn, and cleanup estimates only ever go up"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-10-04T10:44:23Z
modified: 2026-10-04T13:04:34Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/russia-builds-reactors-abroad-while-the-bill-for-its-old-one-7017d6
language: en
tags: ["nuclear", "russia", "waste", "environment", "economy", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Russia Builds Reactors Abroad While the Bill for Its Old Ones Comes Due

*Rosenergoatom’s own estimates put its decommissioning shortfall at €18.7bn, and cleanup estimates only ever go up*

By Nate Ledger · October 4, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/russia-builds-reactors-abroad-while-the-bill-for-its-old-one-7017d6

## In brief

- Lithuania’s EU-required Ignalina shutdown hit an estimated €3.3bn by 2020, with just under half the work done and completion pushed to 2049
- Rosenergoatom plans to decommission 35 reactors; its own numbers show a ~€18.7bn funding gap against a ~€21bn cost
- Bellona says Rosatom’s cleanup obligations could exceed its net profit by around 2037, based on Rosatom’s own projections
- Russia inherited ~774,000 cubic metres of Soviet radioactive waste; decommissioning is expected to add ~800,000 more
- Bellona and Greenpeace are ‘undesirable’ in Russia and EcoDefence is a ‘foreign agent’, shrinking independent oversight

When you build a nuclear power plant, you are really building two things: the plant itself, which generates electricity and, in Russia’s case, a certain amount of geopolitical influence, and a large unfunded liability that shows up decades later, when someone has to take the thing apart. Russia is energetically selling the first half of that package — reactors under construction from Turkiye to Bangladesh, nuclear power marketed as a *sustainable* alternative to fossil fuels, Vladimir Putin personally meeting foreign leaders about current and potential projects. The second half is getting less attention. In an analysis for Al Jazeera, Arshak Makichyan asks what happens to all these reactors — some of the ones inside Russia are more than 50 years old — when they reach the end of their working lives.

## The accounting

Fortunately there is a worked example right next door. When Lithuania joined the European Union, accession required it to shut the two Soviet-built reactors at the Ignalina nuclear plant. The first closed in 2004, the second in 2009. By 2020, the estimated cost of decommissioning had reached 3.3 billion euros ($3.7bn) — with only 49 percent of the planned work actually done — and the completion date had slid from 2038 to 2049. That is what taking apart two reactors, with EU money and EU oversight, looks like. Or take the former plant at Lubmin in Germany: decommissioning there was initially priced at 1 billion euros and is now expected to cost 10 billion euros. The early estimate, empirically, is not a price. It is an aspiration, and it gets revised in one direction.

Now do the arithmetic for Russia. Rosenergoatom, the state nuclear operator, plans to decommission 35 reactors. Its own estimates put the total cost at about 21 billion euros — and the funding shortfall at approximately 18.7 billion euros. Which is to say that, on the company’s own numbers, something like 2.3 billion euros of a 21-billion-euro bill is accounted for, roughly a tenth. And remember the Lubmin and Ignalina track records: those are the friendly numbers, the ones you get before anyone starts work. Actual decommissioning costs, as Makichyan notes, usually come in significantly above early projections.

Imagine, purely hypothetically, that you run a company facing a very large bill due in 2040 and a current budget consumed by other priorities. The move is to defer. And that is essentially what Russia often does: rather than fully dismantling reactors soon after shutdown, it places them in long-term ‘safe’ storage, transferring much of the financial and technical burden to a future that has not yet signed the cheque. Deferred dismantling does not solve the problem; it reschedules it, into the hands of whomever is running things later.

The Bellona Foundation, an environmental NGO, reports — based on Rosatom’s own projections — that by around 2037, Rosatom’s decommissioning and remediation obligations could exceed its net profit. That is a particular kind of balance-sheet moment: the point at which the cleanup of yesterday’s product costs more than the profit from today’s. The further out you push the shutdown costs, the larger the financial, technical and safety risks get, which tends to push them further out, which is the sort of feedback loop accountants do not enjoy modeling.

Then there is the waste. Russia inherited approximately 774,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste from the Soviet Union. The upcoming decommissioning of 36 reactor units at eight nuclear plants is expected to add about 800,000 cubic metres more — a second Soviet inheritance, generated by dismantling the first one.

## The oversight problem

Russia has some experience of what happens when industries leave their liabilities behind. In the Kemerovo region, which produces about half of Russia’s coal, mining waste piles up in burning heaps that pollute nearby communities, and when the coal companies go bankrupt the costs land on the state and the people still living there. Nuclear waste and spent reactors, however, are not something you can simply walk away from if the money runs out — which becomes an increasingly pointed question as Russia’s economic situation deteriorates under a war economy that has drastically weakened environmental regulation. National defence is now by far the largest item in the federal budget; environmental protection is a small fraction of spending. The broader pattern includes an ageing ‘shadow fleet’ of oil tankers and the 2024 Black Sea oil spill, when two ageing Russian tankers released thousands of tonnes of fuel oil into the sea in what was described as the region’s worst environmental disaster in decades.

Meanwhile the people who might independently audit any of this have been thinning out. Bellona and Greenpeace have been declared ‘undesirable’ organisations in Russia; EcoDefence, which campaigned on environmental and nuclear issues, has been designated a ‘foreign agent’ and its members have faced criminal prosecution. A recent report by the Environmental Crisis Group documents how repression and the departure of environmental experts have severely weakened Russia’s environmental movement. Makichyan’s warning is that this creates an information gap: an accident could happen, be concealed or downplayed, and the public might learn the full scale years or decades later. There is precedent. After the 1957 Mayak disaster, Soviet authorities said nothing publicly until 1989, while thousands of people were left to suffer the long-term consequences of radioactive contamination. Chornobyl’s suppression and minimisation, Makichyan argues, fed the distrust and unrest of the late Soviet period — and a nuclear crisis today, met with silence, could do the same while also being an environmental catastrophe.

The externalities then travel. European cooperation with the Russian nuclear industry has largely escaped the sanctions slapped on other parts of Russia’s energy sector, and EcoDefence in exile campaigns against that continued cooperation. According to Vladimir Slivyak, the group’s co-chair, dependence on Russian nuclear technology and services creates vulnerabilities that Russia could potentially exploit for sabotage or political pressure. Makichyan’s counsel to the countries hosting Russia’s many reactor projects — and to every international forum where Russian nuclear lobbyists appear, COPs included — is to think now about a Plan B in case the plants cannot be maintained, or later dismantled, as sold. Russia’s political situation, he notes, can change unpredictably.

The efficient market for reactor exports would price the decommissioning into the sale. In practice the decommissioning is priced into the year 2049, denominated in a currency called ‘somebody else’s problem.’