beyondbrics

The disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant is reverberating around the Moscow headquarters of Rosatom.

Russia’s state atomic agency has been carving out a role for itself as global exporter of nuclear know-how. But with nuclear programmes coming under new scrutiny around the world, Rosatom will have its work cut out turning projects into hard cash.

Governments earlier planning to diversify away from high emission carbon fuels will now come under pressure to delay nuclear power schemes and accept their dependence on oil, coal and gas.

As the world’s largest oil producer, Russia has plenty to offer in the way of fossil fuels if the world turns its back on nuclear energy. But that won’t help Rosatom. As Sergei Kiriyenko, Rosatom chief,  has admitted, the Japanese crisis will affect nuclear programmes generally.

But on Wednesday president Dmitry Medvedev put a brave face on the challenge. He met Turkey’s prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, to discuss Rosatom’s plan to build a $20bn nuclear power plant at Akkuyu on the Turkish Mediterranean, one of the biggest foreign contracts in its portfolio.

Medvedev assured his Turkish visitor that the Akkuyu plant would be able to sustain the most destructive earthquake. “The project that will be realised at Akkuyu is fundamentally different from the one that exploded in Japan both in terms of size and the level of safety,” he said.

Erdogan appeared to agree.  “The atomic station built in Turkey will be a model and an example for the whole of the rest of the world,” he said.

But that may not be enough to satisfy opinion in Turkey, where, as beyondbrics has reported, officials have gone into over-drive to reassure the public.

Meanwhile, other political leaders were showing signs of nervousness about the future of nuclear power as the crisis in Japan spun out of  control.

China, the country with the world’s biggest nuclear power programme , said on Wednesday it was suspending all applications for new nuclear plants – even though on Monday, energy officials publicly backed nuclear power.

In Brussels, Guenther Oettinger, European Union energy commissioner, called for stress tests of all European reactors and raised the prospect of a nuclear-free Europe. He hails from Germany, where Angela Merkel’s government this week launched a review that could lead to the closure of some older plants.

Landed last year, the Turkish contract marked a milestone for Rosatom which is angling for foreign reactor contracts as it plans to double in size and follow France in becoming a global nuclear power (our photo shows a Rosatom plant at Bushehr, Iran). The Russian state enterprise also has orders  to build nuclear plants in Armenia, India and China and is pursuing deals in central Europe and South America.

Older Russian industry officials recall that the 1986 Chernobyl accident cast a pall over the industry for 20 years which had only started to lift very recently.

After Chernobyl, green movements sprang up across the Soviet Union braving official  oppression to demand an end to nuclear power.  The popular protests contributed to the USSR’s collapse five years later.

Today, Russia is increasingly intolerant of environmental lobbyists, seeing them as a potentially dangerous political force. But the greens could rise up again if Rosatom, frustrated in the pursuit of overseas contracts,  pushes ahead with plans to build new nuclear plants in Russia.

Related reading:
Nuclear power file, beyondbrics