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Russia says it will build at least 30 new nuclear power plants between
now and the year 2010. They will include plants of the type that caused
the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. President Yeltsin’s environmental adviser,
Alexei Yablokov, has protested against the decision, and says plants using
natural gas would be much cheaper.

Because of inefficiencies in its electricity supply and an increasing
demand for power by newly privatised industries, Russia has an enormous
shortage of electricity. But it is also short of foreign exchange. David
Kyd, of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, says: ‘Russia
needs its oil and gas to earn foreign exchange. Nuclear is the only way
for them to have sufficient energy supplies.’ Russia’s 28 reactors now supply
12 per cent of its power.

The IAEA was not consulted about the programme. It was initiated by
Victor Mikhailov, Russia’s minister for atomic energy. The plan was approved
by Yeltsin’s government at the end of December.

Last week, the Ministry for Atomic Energy announced that it would complete
several half-built reactors that have been left unfinished because of a
lack of funds, as well as building completely new plants. The new plants
include at least seven, and perhaps 10 pressurised-water reactors called
VVERs, each generating 1000 megawatts.

One VVER will be finished and started up by April, says the ministry.
The reactor is in Balakovo on the Volga River, where three VVERs already
in operation have a long history of accidents.

Russia plans to complete one 1000-megawatt RBMK similar to that at Chernobyl,
at Kursk, south of Moscow near the Ukrainian border. There are four RBMKs
in Kursk already. The ministry says the plant has been redesigned to make
it safer, but officials in the European Commission’s programme for nuclear
safety in Eastern Europe say there is ‘no such thing as a safe RBMK’.

The ministry also plans at least nine reactors of between 500 and 600
megawatts, and about ten smaller ones, of an unspecified design. The ministry
describes them as ‘inherently safe’, and based on reactors used in submarines.
Dima Litvinov, of the Greenpeace office in Moscow, says it is not clear
what kind of reactors these will be, as the design of Russian submarines
is secret. One type known to be used in submarines is a gas-graphite, RBMK
type of reactor.

Russia also plans to build three fast-breeder reactors, two of them
in Kyshtym in the Urals. One of the fast breeders was begun in 1985, but
building stopped in 1989 after local protests. The Ministry of Atomic Energy
also intends to build new reprocessing facilities. Reprocessed fuel from
the fast breeders will add to Russia’s stockpile of plutonium.

Yablokov, the government’s chief adviser on environmental matters, strongly
opposed the decision to build more reactors. Small turbines powered by gas
‘would be at least three times more economical than nuclear plants’, he
said. It would take ‘at most five years’ to build enough gas turbines to
generate the power expected from the planned nuclear plants, which will
take more than 10 years to build.

Yablokov says the decision to choose nuclear power was due to the ‘enormous
nuclear lobby’, which includes the military. He also says the European Energy
Charter, signed in 1991, encourages Russia to sell its oil and gas to western
Europe, ‘so we must develop nuclear power’.