Rosatom outlines future plans at meeting with Russian PM
A transcript of the meeting, posted on the Russian government website, says Mishustin congratulated the company on its 15th anniversary and highlighted the expanding fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers, "the largest and most powerful icebreakers in the world".
Likhachev said the past year "was not an easy year" but added that the company had exceeded targets with a new revenue record of RUB1.7 trillion (USD14 billion).
He thanked the prime minister for helping with the recognition of "nuclear energy as green". As well as Russia, he noted that China and the EU have done the same and that world opinion was now generally of the view that "nuclear energy is green, and based on this, countries are now forming their further development programmes".
"We continue to be leaders in almost all competencies related to nuclear energy in the world. We stay in the top three, in the first places in the production, enrichment of uranium, in the supply of fuel. And of course, we are the undisputed leaders in terms of the construction of nuclear power plants," he said.
The transcript of the meeting, on 31 January, does not include any mention of events in Ukraine, where Russian military forces took control of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant at the start of March 2022, and remain in control of it. Russian forces also occupied the Chernobyl site for more than a month at the start of the war, before withdrawing.
There have been sanctions imposed on large areas of trade and activities with Russia as a result of the military action in Ukraine. Likhachev said that one priority for Rosatom was nuclear medicine and he said "we believe that within the next few years we will completely replace the entire range of imported radiomedicine equipment".
For the future, he said Rosatom continued to be part of the ITER international nuclear fusion project, and said the company was working on fourth generation "fast reactors, lead-cooled reactors, the possibility of eliminating any beyond design basis accidents and closing the fuel cycle - this is everything nuclear power engineers around the world only dream of and we are implementing this project, the Proryv ('breakthrough') project".
