"zalzon" wrote in message
news
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 05:22:08 -0700, Thelasian wrote:
Russia alone is a MAJOR exporter.

Soviet reactors were built primarily for nuclear weaponization and less
for reasons of economics. I devoted a whole paragraph to it in my last
email which apparently was ignored. Its one of the reasons the USSR went
bankrupt. The reactors which Russia are eager to export are not being
built at any frantic pace within Russia itself.

The USSR had two nuclear power plant design families. The first was the
RBMK (Chernobyl type) which was derived from their plutonium production
reactor designs, and the other one is the VVER which was purely a power
production system (and is technically similar to the PWRs of the West).
They never offered RBMKs for export - even to the Warsaw Pack countries. The
VVER was sold to a number of client states (Hungary, Bulgaria etc) as well
as Finland, and more recently to Iran, China and India. (I happened to be at
the Moscow offices of Minatom when the Indians were in negotiation for their
two VVER-1000s in 1998 or 1999). The VVER design was one of the two or
three designs in the running for the recent Finnish order for a new reactor
(the French won the order with their EPR design). The current Russian
energy plan has a number of new nuclear plants in it (17 IIRC) and they are
currently completing a number of the plants whose construction was suspended
post the collapse of the USSR. The suspension of these plants construction
was not due to a distaste for nuclear but because the economic collapse
following 1991 reduced the electricity consumption in Russia and only now is
demand getting to a point where new capacity is needed. What is interesting
in the energy field in Russia is that natural gas makes up some 70% of their
electricity production. The Russian gas company gets several times the
price it is paid in Russia for its exports. It has not invested enough in
production fields to keep up with demand. Over the last few years it has
reduced supply inside Russia to feed its more profitable export markets -
hence increasing the load on the nuclear plants in Russia.