Report - UNDP Russia

consists of out-dated equipment at fuel-fired powerstations. By 2020, 57% of these stations will haveexceeded their design service life.Russia’s nuclear power industry has 31 powergenerating units with total capacity of 23 GW andcurrently generates 16% of all electric powerconsumed in the country. In European Russia theshare of nuclear power is almost twice higher, at 30%.The design service life of the power generating unitsis 30 years. Even though in the original design it wasexpected that this service life could be extended by10-20 years, Russia has to build new capacity simplybecause, sooner or later, the older nuclear reactors willhave to be decommissioned.However, Russia is on an economic growthtrajectory, which will have to be supported by increaseof power generation, and the power generationsolutions need to be implemented long beforedemand for more power rises. New facilities cannot bebuilt quickly from scratch for purely technical reasons,let alone other considerations. In the nuclear industryit takes a minimum of between five and six years tocomplete a single power generating unit after the sitehas already been surveyed and prepared (thepreparatory stage can also take years). So the sort ofnuclear power industry we will have in 10-20 years isto a large extent determined by decisions we tookyesterday and are taking now.Russia’s energy strategy up to 2020 is basedon a number of basic scenarios describing thecountry’s social and economic development in yearsto come. The official energy strategy assumes thatthe fuel-energy balance will need to be optimizedand that increase in the country’s demand forelectricity will best be met by creating additionalnuclear power capacity, primarily in European Russia.The amount of electricity generated by nuclearpower stations must grow from 130 billion kilowatthours in 2000 to 300 billion kilowatt hour in 2020 inthe best case economic-growth scenario and to 220kilowatt hours if a more moderate scenario plays out.This means that the capacity of nuclear powerstations will have to double while the share ofnuclear power in total electricity production willincrease to 23%.One of the main principles of the officialgovernment plan for deployment of electric powerfacilities up to 2020 is maximum possible increase inthe share of facilities not dependent on fossil fuels, i.e.nuclear and hydro-electric power stations.Development of nuclear power would beimpossible without the following prerequisites:• Availability of appropriate designs andtechnologies;• Acceptable levels of safety;• Nuclear power stations must have certainenvironmental advantages over powergeneration using fossil fuel.Russia is currently building nine nuclearpower generation units at home and abroad. Thebackbone of the country’s nuclear powerdevelopment in the coming decade will be the newstandard power generating unit using a VVER-1200(AES-2006) reactor.New technologiesRussian President Dmitry Medvedev hasincluded improvement of nuclear technologiesamong the country’s five main technologydevelopment priorities 7 . Thanks to large-scaleresearch carried out in the past, Russia has all thenecessary tools for creating a new nuclear technology.The new technology must meet several keyrequirements, as follows:• it must be safe;• it must be competitive with other technologies;• it must not be reliant on limited fuel reserves;• it must be environment friendly;• it must help solve nuclear non-proliferation tasks.All these requirements are met by newtechnologies based on use of fast reactors in a closedfuel loop.Fast reactors, also known as fast neutronreactors, represent a strategic innovation in thenuclear energy sector. Five countries (Russia, France,Japan, India and China) have achieved mostsignificant results in development of thistechnology, and Russia is leading the way thanks tocompletion of the Beloyarsk nuclear power station,7Dmitry Medvedev: ‘Forward, Russia!’. September 10, 2009.119