Nuclear Power, Infrastructure Projects Announced by Putin

April 26, 2007 (EIRNS)--In his message to the Federal Assembly today, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the time has come for "a second large-scale electrification of the country." This striking formulation harks back to the famous GOELRO plan in the 1920s, which is remembered for Lenin's slogan "Soviet Power + Electrification of the Whole Country = Socialism," but was designed by the explicitly pro-American engineer (and collaborator of V.I. Vernadsky) G.M. Krzhizhanovsky.

Notably not stressed was the long-standing campaign by Anatoli Chubais, now CEO of the national utility Unified Energy Systems (UES), to model the restructuring of power generation on British Commonwealth-model schemes that prioritize profit flows for shareholders. Without explicitly rejecting that, Putin chose to emphasize the physical side of power generation.

Putin said that Russia is already confronting "the lack of sufficient generating capacity for further growth." The sector's reform, he said, must lead to the increase of power output by two-thirds before 2020. Combined government and private investment in doing this will be 12 trillion rubles ($460 billion), in order to building new power plants and modernize the infrastructure.

Thirty nuclear power units were built during the entire Soviet period, Putin said. "In the next 12 years, we need to build 26 of them, using the most advanced technologies."

He proposed creation of a new, special corporation, bringing together the nuclear power industry, and working both within Russia and for export. This is, in fact, already the perspective of the Rosatom agency, under Sergei Kiriyenko.

Putin noted that Russia's hydroelectric potential is currently only 20 percent exploited. "Construction of large hydroelectric plants must be launched, above all in Siberia and the Far East," he urged.

Besides a lengthy discussion of improving Russia's roads, and briefer mention of rail and air transport, Putin enumerated elements of his plan to upgrade Russia's ports and its great inland waterway network. He challenged the government to work on establishing an international consortium to build a second Volga-Don Canal, in order to "improve ship traffic between the Caspian and Black Seas." (The Volga empties into the Caspian, while the Don bends westward and flows into the Black Sea.) Putin said he had already discussed this plan preliminarily with the other Caspian Sea littoral countries, and that "for Russia, this could become yet another major, economically beneficial infrastructure project."

Other economic tasks, touched on in this speech, included: upgrading Russia's processing of its own raw materials, including mineral resources, but also fish; promotion of the "innovation economy"; investment in basic scientific research, including both the Russian Academy of Sciences, and other science centers; nanotechnologies, on which he recently held a special meeting.

In the first part of the speech, he reviewed the status of the existing National Projects, which cover agriculture, education, and housing. The latter, Putin presented as a national emergency: to rescue Russian people now living in substandard housing, much of which has hardly been maintained since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 Putin said that funds from the sale of Yukos Oil Company assets could be one source for financing an urgent, $10 billion fund to move people out of dilapidated housing.