Officials Hide Information about Incident at Nuclear Plant Building Site

How­ev­er, the first press release about the inci­dent came out two weeks lat­er, on July 25, when the first rumors appeared on the Inter­net. Ini­tial­ly, the respon­si­ble com­pa­ny Atom­stroy­ex­port, sub­sidiary of Rosatom, denied the rumors, and only hours lat­er the Belaru­sian Ener­gy Min­istry con­firmed, how­ev­er deny­ing the grav­i­ty of the inci­dent. While the offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tives say it is a stan­dard sit­u­a­tion, the Inter­net explod­ed with black humor com­ment­ing the inci­dent.

Jour­nal­ists of the Radio Svabo­da request­ed access to the site, but the infor­ma­tion­al cen­ter of the con­struc­tion enter­prise Belaru­sian NPP declined, say­ing there is a gen­er­al pro­ce­dure for jour­nal­ists.

The gen­er­al pro­ce­dure for accred­i­ta­tion to access the con­struc­tion site requires jour­nal­ists to apply 14 days before the vis­it (a month before – for for­eign jour­nal­ists), sub­mit­ting per­son­al data, accred­i­ta­tion, type of vehi­cle and plans of reports, arti­cles, inter­views, sce­nario plans of pho­to and video. The Radio Svabo­da had already applied, but it means they can get there only a month after the inci­dent occurred.