Russia aims to build 28 new nuclear power units with high safety standards before 2030.
Disclosing this, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin Monday told university students at a meeting here that “in Russia’s energy mix, the share of nuclear power is not big, just 16 percent”.
“Our goal is to reach 25 percent,” ITAR-TASS quoted him as saying.
“This speaks of the fact that by 2030 we must build 28 more large power units. This is nearly the same as the number of units made and commissioned over the entire Soviet period,” Putin added.
He also said that ROSATOM, the Russian state-run nuclear power corporation and builders of the Kundamkulam nuclear power plant (KNPP) in Tamil Nadu, had in addition got orders for building 22 nuclear power units abroad.
Putin further said the development of nuclear power in the world is inevitable, despite concerns of safety after the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
“All other world countries consider necessary to develop nuclear power, and I think this is inevitable,” the president said. “It is impossible to reverse the progress. There is another issue that is how to ensure safety.”
“What ROSATOM offers as projects for both domestic and international markets meets higher safety standards introduced after the accident in Japan,” the Russian president said.
Denis Kolchinskiy, chief project engineer of SPbAEP, the developers of the nuclear reactor installed at Kudankulam in India, told IANS recently that modern Russian designs have an optimised balance of active and passive safety systems that have been developed over a decade.
However, should the reactor fail to be cooled down for some reason, the fuel inside would not melt down, and the molten core would go to a “catcher”, which would ensure its cooling down and prevent release of hydrogen, Kolchinsky said.