Russia has announced plans for a major buildout of its nuclear energy capacity.
Yesterday, Alexey Likhachev, director general of the country’s state atomic energy corporation Rosatom, said Russia aimed to add 38 new nuclear reactors to its existing fleet in the coming years.
Likhachev was speaking at the general conference of the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) which is taking place in Vienna from yesterday to September 19.
If realised, the plans would about double Russia’s nuclear power capacities.
According to the World Nuclear Association, a lobbying organisation, the country currently operates 36 reactors.
Likhachev said Russian President Vladimir Putin had demanded that the country increase the share of nuclear power in its total electricity generation from around 20 per cent to 25 per cent although no timeframe was given.
According to the IAEA, five new large reactors are currently under construction in Russia.
In 2022 the country built the world’s first floating nuclear power plant, which supplies the remote Siberian town of Pevek.
Since 2022, Russia has also occupied the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine – the largest nuclear power station in Europe with seven reactors.
Nuclear power is on the rise globally. On September 18, US President Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer are expected to sign a treaty allowing both countries to use each other’s security assessments for reactor constructions.
This move would reduce the approval time for new nuclear power plants from three to four years to two years, according to the British government. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said: “The United States is ushering in a true nuclear renaissance – harnessing the power of commercial nuclear to meet rising energy demand.”
The only major power untouched by this renaissance is Germany.
Yesterday, the country’s new economics minister Katherina Reiche (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) presented a monitoring report on Germany’s energy transition. That is the long-running and costly attempt to replace fossil and nuclear power generation with supposedly “green” solar and wind power.
Reiche acknowledged that the energy transition had wasted billions of euros and caused electricity prices to rocket, contributing to Germany’s ongoing deindustrialisation.
She also confirmed, though, that the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) would stick to the programme’s key goalposts such as “net zero” by 2045, the buildout of wind and solar power and no return to nuclear power.
Since the government shut down its last three operating nuclear plants in 2023, Germany has moved forward with destroying the reactors within and tearing down the plants, preventing any future restart of its nuclear programme.
As the next step, the cooling towers of the Gundremmingen nuclear plant in Bavaria – which had a capacity of almost 3 gigawatts (GW) – will be blown up on October 25.
