Russian-built nuclear power plants see rising demand around the world

RT
Sat, 10 Mar 2018 12:46 UTC

Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom expects to sign foreign contracts worth $26 billion this year for the construction and maintenance of nuclear power plants, official data shows.

According to its results for 2017, Rosatom's portfolio of foreign orders for the next decade totals $133.6 billion. The company traditionally calculates its portfolio of orders for a period of 10 years. Head of Rosatom Alexei Likhachev told reporters that the firm hopes to exceed the $130-billion mark.

The Russian company has recently inked agreements on nuclear cooperation with India, Iran, Egypt, China, and a number of other countries. It is bidding to construct 16 nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia.

The corporation will also help Japan to clean up after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The assistance was offered by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017.

Officials say the decommissioning of the wrecked Fukushima reactors will take several decades, and - according to some estimates - the cost could reach $200 billion.

Comment: On February 27th the head of Rosatom met with Vladimir Putin and shared the company's performance and investment strategies:

Rosatom's investment has increased over the past six years by about 20%, while the share of its funding from the state budget has decreased from 40% to 24%, he told Putin. "The corporation invests its money both in new products and, obviously, in the construction of nuclear power plants," he said.

"We have reached all the main construction targets both in Russia and outside the country for the previous year [and] for the first time in modern Russia, we've conducted two first criticality programmes, including for unit 4 of the Rostov NPP. With your involvement, in January we started increasing its capacity to the nominal output. Everything is on schedule," he said.

"Another first criticality procedure was conducted on unit 1 of Leningrad NPP II. It is very important to note that this will be the second Generation III+ unit in operation in Russia, meeting all the post-Fukushima safety requirements, including both active and passive safety systems.

"It is the second energy unit in Russia of this type. In February 2017, the unit 6 of the Novovoronezh NPP was put into commercial operation - a real breakthrough in global nuclear energy construction," he said.

Thanks to the addition of Novovoronezh 6, Rosatom last year set a record in electricity output by exceeding 200 terawatt hours and reaching 203 TWh, he said. The Soviet record - which included Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian and Lithuanian nuclear power plants - was 212 TWh.

"We are moving quickly towards breaking that record," Likhachov said.

"It is also very important to note that the corporation is developing not only high-capacity facilities but a whole number of small and medium-capacity sources. This year, we are launching our 'first-born', the Akademik Lomonosov floating nuclear power plant," he said, adding that first criticality procedures are scheduled to take place this year.

All these projects are helping Rosatom "maintain global leadership", he said. "Despite fierce competition, we are building more units abroad than all the other countries put together."

Yet another example of how Russian ingenuity and generosity is helping to build a complex, multi-polar world.