The joint Russian-German construction management committee made the decision to commission the first stage, Antipov said. Originally, he added, commissioning was scheduled for September.
He said the site chosen for this facility had turned out to be more geographically complicated than planned, so the project had become more expensive and the timeframe for its implementation had been extended.
The Russian-German construction management committee was established following a 2003 agreement between the countries on creating a long-term storage site for reactor blocks in the Murmansk region.
Today it is the partnership's major project, at a cost of around 300 million euros. Antipov said the German government had provided guarantees on financing the construction of two stages of the storage site.
Germany allocated some 1 billion euros for this program, with 300 million to be spent on the construction of the two stages, and another 300 million on chemical weapons destruction.
