Mikhail Kovalchuk, the president of the Kurchatov Institute National Research Center, in an interview with Izvestia on Oct. 25, spoke of a new form of nuclear energy that can be utilized in the hard-to-reach areas of the Arctic and the Northern Sea Route. Kovalchuk explained: “We have a fundamentally new form of nuclear power. A nuclear power plant in the form of a nuclear battery, not on direct energy conversion. The heat of the reactor is converted into electricity. Next you heat boiling water. In a pressure cooker it’s a steam generator, pressurized steam comes out of it, opens the turbines. There’s also thermoelectric elements in there, and they just take the reactor heat without motion, without everything, and convert it to electricity.”
He said that in a similar development scientists are creating a version of the Selena station for the development of the Moon. “Today we are taking this all to a new level. And I can give you dozens of such examples,” he said.
