Techsnabexport

In 1949, a working group of ten people was formed at the All-Union Association "Technoexport" of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Trade , whose task was to organize the supply of uranium mining enterprises built by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. In 1952, on the basis of the working group, the Technical Supply Office was established, which collaborated with the Soviet-German joint - stock company Bismuth , the Jachymov mines in Czechoslovakia , the Quartzite enterprise in Romania , the Kuznetsk mines in Poland , and the Soviet-Bulgarian mountain society. In 1955, during the reorganization of Technoexport, the Office in its entirety was transferred to Mashinoexport ^[3] .

Expanding the list of delivered goods and increasing the scale of uranium imports led to the question of expanding the Office and giving it the status of an independent foreign trade organization. On July 17, 1963, by Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 1477-rs, the All-Union Export-Import Bureau Tekhsnabexport ^{[4] was established} , which was engaged in the supply of equipment to Eastern European uranium enterprises and for the calculation of uranium import into the USSR, foreign trade operations with rare-earth, rare and refractory metals , radioactive and stable isotopes, sources of ionizing radiation, instrumentation, as well as accelerator and x-ray equipment.

In 1975, the export and import office of Techsnabexport was transformed into the All-Union Association (V / O) Techsnabexport, the main focus of which is the supply of uranium products abroad. In 1988, the Higher Technical Institution Techsnabexport was transferred to the Ministry of Secondary Engineering of the USSR (today, the State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom). In 2007, Techsnabexport was included in the Atomenergoprom JSC , 100% of the shares of which belong to the State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom ^[5] .

In 1971, the first contract for the supply of uranium enrichment services was signed with the French Atomic Energy Commissariat, which meant that Techsnabexport actually entered the European and then the global uranium market: in the 1970s and 1980s, contracts were signed and the first deliveries were made to Italy, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Great Britain, Belgium, the Republic of Korea. In the 1990s, Techsnabexport entered into contracts with South Africa, China, Switzerland, and Japan; in the 2000s, with Mexico and the Czech Republic ^[6] .

In October 1992, the signing by the Minatom of Russia and the US Department of Commerce of the Agreement on Suspension of the Anti-dumping Investigation on the Supply of Uranium Products from the Russian Federation (SPAR), the anti-dumping investigation initiated by American producers of natural uranium in the early 1990s against the export of Russian natural uranium was suspended. The SPAR conditions allowed the commercial supply of enriched uranium to the United States to a small extent within the agreed quotas until 2002 ^[7] .

In 1994, in order to implement the Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the US Government on the use of highly enriched uranium extracted from nuclear weapons ( HEU-LEU Agreement ), Techsnabexport signed a contract with the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC), in accordance with with which, by the end of 2013, LEU was supplied to the United States, obtained as a result of processing 500 tons of HEU extracted from dismantled warheads. The total income of the Russian side amounted to approximately 17 billion US dollars ^[8] .

In 2008, the State Atomic Energy Corporation ROSATOM and the US Department of Commerce signed an Amendment to SPAR for the supply of uranium products from the Russian Federation, developed on the initiative and with the direct participation of Techsnabexport and created the necessary legal conditions for the commercial release of Russian uranium products closed for it in the previous decade American market.

During the period of active market reforms of the Russian nuclear industry in 2002-2007. TENEX supported production through the purchase and consolidation of a number of assets in the field of uranium mining, mechanical engineering and the chemical industry. As economic sustainability was achieved, these non-core enterprises were transferred to other industry enterprises - TVEL JSC (transferred to the Russian Gas Centrifuge holding), Composite Holding (transferred to the Khimpromengineering scientific and production complex), Atomredmetzoloto JSC (Russian and foreign assets in the field of uranium mining) [7]. In 2008, pursuant to the Protocol of November 6, 2007 to the Russian-Chinese intergovernmental Agreement on cooperation in the construction of a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plant for nuclear energy in the territory of China on December 18, 1992, Techsnabexport entered into contracts with a Chinese company of the atomic energy industry to provide technical assistance in the construction of phase IV of a gas centrifuge plant in China, successfully commissioned in 2011, as well as to provide uranium enrichment services and / or supply of enriched th uranium product in the period of 2010-2020.

In 2012, a contract was signed with the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (United Arab Emirates) for the supply of low enriched uranium from 2015 to 2029 to cover the needs of the first Arabian nuclear power plant in Barak ^[9] .

In pursuance of the tripartite interagency Memorandum of cooperation in the peaceful uses of atomic energy in 2016, Techsnabexport JSC is collaborating with Japanese partners in the field of the aftermath of the accident at the Fukushima-1 Japanese nuclear power plant . A consortium of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise RosRAO and JSC Techsnabexport, following a tender held in 2017 by the Mitsubishi Research Institute, is implementing a set of works to create a neutron detector for searching and identifying fragments of damaged nuclear fuel in the reactor chamber ^[10] .

In February 2017, the Government of the Russian Federation by decree No. 211-r determined Techsnabexport JSC as the only organization authorized to enter into foreign trade transactions related to the import into the Russian Federation of irradiated fuel assemblies of nuclear reactors ^[11] .

In 2017, the State Atomic Energy Corporation ROSATOM authorized Techsnabexport JSC to transit low enriched uranium through the territory of the Russian Federation as part of the project to establish the IAEA LEU Bank in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

In February 2018, Techsnabexport JSC in a consortium with FSUE RosRAO JSC Radium Institute named after V.G. Khlopina ”and JSC“ SSC RIAR ”was selected as the contractor within the framework of a project sponsored by the Japanese Government to develop technologies for analyzing changes in the properties of corium during aging. Within the framework of the project, corium and lava samples of the Chernobyl accident nuclear power plant will be studied and model samples of the fuel fragments of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant will be made to develop a predictive model for changing the characteristics of the corium to be used in the aftermath of the accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant ^[12] .

An important area of ​​the company’s activities is the transport and logistics of supplies.

Export-import shipments are carried out by JSC Techsnabexport with the involvement of foreign freight forwarding companies that have all the necessary permits. Uranium products are delivered by sea (through the seaports of St. Petersburg, Ust-Luga, Bronka and Vostochny) and by rail (in China).

Freight forwarding services in the Russian territory are provided by a subsidiary of JSC St. Petersburg Isotope.

JSC Techsnabexport on an ongoing basis carries out activities aimed at expanding the route network of supplies of nuclear products, diversifying export points of production, developing its own fleet of transport equipment, and licensing and customs support. The company has the ability to provide logistics services for the transportation of uranium products to third-party customers using the Far Eastern transport corridor ^[13] .

• JSC SPb IZOTOP
• TENEX-Logistics JSC
• LLC "Crown"
• INTERNEXCO GmbH - Zug, Switzerland
• TENEX-Korea Co., Ltd. - Seoul , Republic of Korea
• TENEX-Japan Co. - Tokyo , Japan
• TRADEWILL LIMITED - London , United Kingdom
• TENAM Corporation - Washington, USA ^[14]

• Official site of Techsnabexport JSC
• Public annual reports of JSC Techsnabexport
• Techsnabexport on the website of the Russian Atomic-energy.ru