The Nadezhnost’ i bezopasnost’ energetiki (Safety & Reliability of Power Industry) scientific and technical journal has been published since 2008.

As the editorial board of the Nadezhnost’ i bezopasnost’ energetiki journal determined its structure and scope of coverage, the following provisions were considered:

• steady development of modern society is impossible without its being securely provided with all the kinds of energy: thermal, electrical, mechanical ones; intermediary energy carriers – motor and other fuels;

• the main criterion, which determines the possibility of electric power generation is operational safety of power generating equipment, i.e., preventing sudden failures of its high load components;

• the above failures (accidents) are generally caused by such factors as defects of manufacture, as well as non-compliance with stipulated standards and regulations by the service or repair personnel (the so-called “human error”), the latter factor tending to prevail as the equipment service life is getting longer;

• apart from an immediate threat to life and health of the service personnel and property losses due to destruction of expensive equipment, emergency situations may lead to cessation of supplying consumers with electric energy and heat, which, in its turn, would result in emergence of new kinds of hazards related to disruption of activity of the human community.

Besides, generation of all kinds of energy from primary sources (oil, gas, coal, nuclear fuel, etc.) is associated with adverse impact of such generation on the environment, life and health of people. In other words, it becomes necessary to consider the factors of environmental safety of the aforesaid processes.

Another principal aspect of today’s state of Russia’s power industry is objective deterioration of reliability and safety of functioning of Russia’s Unified Energy Systems (UES) due to the lack of power capacity, wear of fixed assets, as well as artificial separation of concurrent processes of generation, transmission and consumption of electric energy and heat, i.e., emergence of new independent entities of the market of thermal and electrical energy. To bring the market procedures in line with reliability and safety requirements, we need both mandatory requirements to electric power generation facilities and consumers’ power-receiving plants. Therefore, to ensure reliability and safety of electrical power industry in operation in new conditions, it is necessary both to develop a new regulatory framework and to create at the government level a single center of responsibility for technical regulation in electrical power industry.