Key documents relating to Fennovoima's planned nuclear reactor at Pyhäjoki are more than six months late in arriving at Finland's nuclear regulator, STUK. The supplier of the reactor, the Russian state-owned firm Rosatom, has not provided the papers required according to a timetable proposed by Fennovoima in 2015.
The plan had suggested that the documents would arrive in tranches, deliveries starting at the start of this year and continuing until 2017. Construction would--according to this timetable--begin in 2018.
"Of course we've had discussions on technical matters with Fennovoima and the supplier," said Tapani Virolainen, deputy director of STUK. "However we haven't received the documentation on the basis of which we can perform an official inspection."
Virolainen suggests that Rosatom was not yet ready for the project when the decision-in-principle to approve the plant was made, and has since struggled to meet the timetable.
Fennovoima claims that the bulk of the documentation is in order, but in some of the document batches a single item is missing. The firm is hanging back, it claims, in order to provide complete information at the first attempt.
The news of late documentation comes on the heels of revelations on Monday that a senior Fennovoima manager was fired for having met STUK to discuss concerns over the project.