Director General of State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom
Alexei Likhachev reported to the President of Russia
Vladimir Putin about Rosatom’s performance and the
implementation of its investment strategy in Russia and
abroad. This meeting was in the Moscow Kremlin.
Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev said: ‘Our programme for the
development of the nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet is based
on two main issues: our projections regarding the increase
in the transportation of raw materials produced in the
northern regions, and the possibility of rerouting cargo
from alternative itineraries, including marine routes such
as the Suez Canal.
As we see it, we must ensure the eastward transportation of
at least 70 million tonnes of cargo to the growing Southeast
Asian markets starting in 2030.
This means that we need two more multipurpose icebreakers in
addition to the three 60 MW icebreakers that are being built
at the Baltic Shipyard. We also need a flotilla of
medium-sized icebreakers for the westbound deliveries to
Europe. And lastly, we need to adopt a decision on the
construction of a new-generation icebreaker in late 2018 or
early 2019.
The icebreaker Lider with a 120 MW power plant, which will
make it many times more powerful than any of the existing
icebreakers. The main task is to ensure a service speed of
at least 10–12 knots per hour in two-meter ice.
This unique icebreaker – there are no such icebreakers
anywhere in the world now – will enable us to develop our
northern deposits at the speed projected in the plans of our
mining companies, primarily NOVATEK. The required meetings
regarding this issue have been held, including at the level
of the Prime Minister.
Coming back to the state corporation’s investment programme,
firstly, I would like to tell you about our general
approach. The amount of investment is growing. Over the past
six years it has grown by around 20 percent, while the share
of budget investment has dropped from 40 to 24 percent. The
corporation invests its money both in new products and,
obviously, in construction of nuclear power plants.
We have reached all the main construction targets both in
Russia and outside the country for the previous year. For
the first time in modern Russia, we 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.
Another first criticality procedure was conducted on Unit 1
of the Leningrad NPP 2. It is very important to note that it
is the second operating 3+ generation unit in Russia that
meets 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 so-called sixth unit of the Novovoronezh
NPP was put in commercial operation, which became a true
breakthrough in global nuclear energy construction.
Thanks to that unit, last year we set a record in
electricity output by exceeding 200 billion kWh and reaching
203 billion. The Soviet record brought about by the Russian
as well as Ukrainian, Armenian and Lithuanian nuclear power
plants was 212 billion kWh. We are moving fast towards
breaking that record.
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. We are planning first
criticality procedures.
All these projects on our nuclear energy agenda are helping
us maintain global leadership. Despite fierce competition,
we are building more units abroad than all the other
countries put together. We sense that competition is
tightening, and sooner or later our partners, friends and
rivals will gain access to this technology, which is why we
are focusing on completely new areas.
We are working with the Kurchatov Institute and the Academy
of Sciences on a thermonuclear energy programme. It is a
very serious field where we keep abreast with the
international scientific community. Of course, we also
believe that the immediate future, that is, the time that is
within our reach, belongs to the so-called two-component
power units, where traditional VVER (pressurised water
reactor) thermal reactors are complemented with fast neutron
reactors.
Ours is the only company with commercial experience of using
such reactors. We have them, the BN-600 and BN-800 reactors,
at the Beloyarskaya NPP in the Sverdlovsk Region. We have
launched a breakthrough Proryv project in Seversk in the
Tomsk Region, where we are working on the experimental
BREST-300 reactor, plus fuel production and fuel recycling
modules.
The thing is that the combined use of thermal and fast
neutron reactor technologies allows using nuclear fuel waste
over and over again in a closed fuel cycle.
This project has three major benefits. First of all, the
risk of accidents is many times lower in fast neutron
reactors and the level of security is therefore much higher.
It is important that by using our raw materials several
times in the fuel cycle we make our raw materials base
almost infinite. In other words, the uranium we have now
will serve us for thousands of years to come.
And lastly, we will reduce the amount of radioactive nuclear
waste that has to be buried, which is very expensive, to
nearly zero. We will have a so-called equivalent exchange as
if it were with Nature, returning to it only as much
radioactivity as we take from it.
What is the biggest problem in this sphere? It is obvious
that we would like to go over from the pilot project,
Proryv, to commercial production. We want to start building
fast reactors around the world. This calls for building the
first such commercial reactor with a capacity of at least
1,200 MW in Russia.
We have submitted this proposal to the Government, and we
hope to be able to add the first 1,200 MW fast reactor to
the national energy system in 2020.
After that, we will be able to offer our partners and other
countries around the world the construction of not just
standard water-cooled and water-moderated reactors, but
entire commercial energy complexes, which is exactly what we
are doing right now.
In addition to its leadership position in nuclear
technologies, Rosatom also works in other innovative areas.
Technological leadership beyond our industry is the next
decade’s challenge for Rosatom, as well as to gain a
foothold outside Russia. The plans involve powerful energy
storage devices, superconductivity, of course, and the use
of powerful lasers for peaceful purposes.
And digital products, too. Following your instructions, the
instructions of the Government, we are working on the
programme for the digital transformation of the Russian
economy. Our job is to develop four basic end-to-end
technologies, extremely important, namely quantum
technologies, virtual augmented reality technologies, Big
Data technologies, and new industrial production reserves.
Here it is important to emphasise that we at Rosatom have
quite a few digital developments of our own, which we use
for our own purposes, including for the nuclear weapons
industry. Our job now is to turn them into products, make
them attractive primarily for Russian companies. They should
certainly meet the highest requirements of the world market.
In general, the task you assigned us of making new products,
civilian products in the nuclear weapons industry is
significant and challenging. As of today, the results of the
past year are that civilian production accounted for 26
percent of what the nuclear weapons industry did.
But it should be noted that outside the industry, it only
accounts for 15 percent; we supply 40 percent of our
civilian orders to the nuclear weapons industry; we are
actually building up competencies and getting ready to enter
the big market, as they say. At the same time, last year
100% of the state defence order was executed on time.
Mr President, none of this work would be possible without
people. Rosatom is working hard on recruitment, starting
from school age. Our industry universities, our flagship
university MEPhI train thousands of young professionals. We
recruit more than 1,000 people annually – the best students,
with an average GPA over 4.5.
It is gratifying that a whole range of programmes and
initiatives are now developing at the federal level: Mentor,
Leaders of Russia, and Russia – Country of Opportunities. We
will be taking an active part.
Last year, for the third consecutive time, we won the
Russian WorldSkills competition of end-to-end working
professions – a true celebration of the working man. You
know the winners in many industries. And now, together with
the government of Tatarstan, we are working to hold a world
championship here in 2019.
We would also like the city of Kazan to host, in addition to
these world competitions in traditional working professions,
a kind of professional Davos, like the world leaders’
meeting, to discuss the needs of the labour market, the
training of personnel in the long term, so that our
secondary vocational schools and higher educational
institutions – the line between them is gradually eroding as
the levels of training are converging – received a personnel
training order for the next few years directly from the
leaders of the world economy, from the leaders of
countries.’
