Fifty years ago, the Obniskaya Nuclear Power Station, the first in the world, was put into operation. Today, after nearly two decades of crisis, nuclear power is again on the rise

Irik Imamutdinov and Dan Medovnikov

An interview with Alexander Rumyantsev, Head of the Federal Atomic Power Agency and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

- Every technology has its own life cycle. At first, it expands furiously, then reaches a plateau and stagnates. Occasionally but very rarely, technologies get a new lease on life. After Chernobyl, the spell of “peaceful atom” was broken and the nuclear power industry ground to a halt. However, judging by a host of signals coming from several national economies, nuclear power is back on the agenda, in part because the public opinion is changing once again.
- Your observation is correct. Finland is a good example. We conducted a public opinion poll there, and the majority of the population supported construction of a nuclear power station, and so did the parliament. Let’s not forget that the pragmatic Finnish technocrats clearly realized that the situation could change again, so they decided to take advantage of the favorable conditions to get the most energy possible, and the contract went to the biggest reactor. Look at what is happening in Eastern Europe and in Central Asia. Two years ago, Iran made a statement at an IAEA General Convention in front of all the delegates, saying “We are developing large-scale nuclear engineering and welcome all countries to participate in the project.” The capacity of the notorious nuclear power station in Bushehr is 1 GW, and now the Iranians want to put six times as much into operation. India has ambitious plans, too: it plans to put 20 GW of nuclear capacity into operation, or in other words, a new reactor block each year. China will increase nuclear power from 8 to 36 GW by 2020. Russia’s energy strategy until 2020 also states that nuclear power will grow at a faster pace in the European part of Russia than traditional power plants. Recovery has begun in the US as well. Bush called on the nation to develop the hydrogen economy and large-scale nuclear power engineering needs high-temperature gas nuclear reactors. And of course, there is South Korea and Japan where nuclear power hasn’t experienced any slowdown at all. 
- But the world nuclear powers are extremely wary of some countries’ nuclear ambitions, since some reactors can turn out weapons-grade plutonium and all of them can be used to make dirty bombs. Personnel at local nuclear power stations are skilled atomic specialists who have learned to handle fissionable materials. In the end, almost everyone knows how to use the technology now, and if some country with nuclear facilities really wants to build nuclear weapons, it will – this is a major deterrent factor for nuclear power development in the world.
- Countries that are economically developed and scientifically and technically advanced, like Japan or Germany, can easily create these technologies and weapons. South Africa was in the process of creating them and, perhaps, could have but it gave up activities voluntarily. Israel neither confirms nor admits officially that it possesses nuclear weapons. However, the overwhelming majority of countries simply don’t need nuclear status. What would, say, Monaco stand to gain from the bomb? Nuclear status would only ruin the country’s economy. As a matter of fact, we have discussed these topics extensively with IAEA General Director Mohamed El-Baradei. I fully agree with his stance: we have the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The countries that signed this Treaty are entitled to develop civilian nuclear programs. Those that already have them are obliged to help. Please note that they are obliged to help. And the Iranian problem is more likely an inadequate reaction on the part of certain states. Since apart from Iran, there are other countries unable to make a nuclear reactor. What do they all need? They need the nuclear powers to guarantee long-term supplies of fuel with unconditional return of spent fuel to the country of origins or to some international consortium. In this case, they would enjoy all the benefits of atomic power and nuclear technologies, while “dirty bombs” would remain a tabloid fantasy.  
- Isn’t that a bit too optimistic? After all, in the decades the NPT has been in effect (it was signed in 1968), the number of nuclear powers has increased by perhaps three countries (if we add Israel to India and Pakistan).
- By only three, while without the NPT and IAEA monitoring this number could well have jumped to ten. Incidentally, control is quite efficient. There were rumors very recently that in Iran some building had been demolished and a layer of soil removed. The IAEA inspection team immediately arrived on site, examined it, and found out that the work had nothing to do with nuclear matters.
- We began our interview with the statement that atomic power is experiencing a renaissance. However, even if all goes well, traditional technologies – graphite-uranium and heavy water reactors (âîäíî-âîäÿíûé ðåàêòîð) as well as the breeder reactors invented fifty years ago– will be used for the next twenty years. It’s clear that innovation cycles in power engineering are very long but something will definitely have to change in about fifty years.
- I can’t predict what will happen in fifty years because we are at the stage of scientific and technological development that could enable scientists to change the world’s power strategy fairly quickly –in one or two decades – depending on economic and political conditions. There are a lot of possibilities even if we don’t take controlled thermonuclear and hydrogen power into account for the time being. It cannot be ruled out that new coal processing technology will be developed, and there is much more coal on the planet than oil and gas. We have yet to handle certain fuels properly and there are offshore reserves of hydrocarbons that could last for ages. The question is when it will be feasible to develop them. According to many experts, large-scale atomic power engineering also has a fair chance. But they also point out the limits of uranium deposits. Once again, it’s a question of market conditions. The uranium that costs less than $40 per kilo is in short supply. If the price were, say, $100 per kilo, uranium could be extracted from seawater. We shouldn’t forget about huge reserves of nuclear weapons material either. Of course, breeders were invented long ago, but they are the reactors that can use weapons-grade materials to meet civilian energy needs. And if you want to know my opinion, I believe that fast reactors have very good prospects.
- What do you think about attempts to find environmentally friendly ways to produce atomic power? If a real breakthrough in this area came, would the future of atomic power look simply brilliant? No radioactive waste whatsoever, no problems with waste disposal and so on.
- I’m familiar with one of the winning projects at Russian Innovations Competition this year. It received the White Book Prize and carries the ambitious name of “Clean Technology for Producing Atomic Energy.” It’s not nonsense. Indeed, nuclear reactions could with certain probability go along the channel that would produce waste that would quickly transform into stable isotopes – in other words, there would be no long-lived isotopes at the end at all. The question is how to critically increase probability of nuclear reaction passing along these very channels (which scientists refer to as reaction mode)? In terms of technical implementation, it’s a fantasy for the time being that makes controlled thermonuclear reactions look like a chapter from a science history textbook. Still, this research is worthwhile and challenging. It is necessary for independent research teams to confirm the results.
- A nuclear project is a splendid example of rapid innovation: just few years are needed between basic scientific discoveries and industrial implementation. In what other areas of science, in your opinion, can we expect something similar today?
- Another well-known and no less splendid example comes to mind, namely the link between research in semiconductor physics and information technologies. Today, the highest hopes are for biotechnologies and medicine – first and foremost, with treatments for diseases that so far have been considered incurable, for example, cancer. As for physics, the scientific community is looking forward to the launch of a new super-booster – a large particle collider at CERN. It will either confirm or disprove ideas determining the so-called standard model of the modern theory of structure of matter. This directly concerns the theory of intra-nuclear interactions theory and cosmogonic principles as well. Strange as it may sound, these experiments could turn into another innovation breakthrough. Remember, in 1937, five years before the launch of the first nuclear reactor, Rutherford argued that nuclear power would find practical application in about two or three centuries.   

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