On Feb. 11, Russia’s State Corporation Rosatom and the National Research Center (NRC)/Kurchatov Institute signed a document on the creation of a joint strategic council for closer cooperation in 13 scientific areas in the nuclear field. The agreement will cover areas of promising technologies, from the development of nuclear energy and nuclear medicine, to projects for the exploration of the Arctic and space.
“This is not entirely new,” Rosatom CEO Alexey Likhachev noted. “We have used them all in one way or another. Today, each of these individual directions, projects, is being systematized and formalized into independent scientific and industrial projects. That is the point.”
”I want to say, you know, we have the right kind of ping-pong,” Mikhail Kovalchuk, Director of the Kurchatov Institute, said. “Because in reality, the event is not just important, but epochal. With our enriched efforts, we guarantee, so to speak, the successful development of the country.” He emphasized that today’s science differs from the era when Soviet scientists developed nuclear weapons behind closed doors. Russia now needs to build a high-tech economy. Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute are participating in this as a state corporation and a national laboratory, forming an ultra-modern high-tech base for the country’s development.
Kovalchuk also underlined the decisive contribution of Russian scientists to the development of the global nuclear industry. “We were the first on the Eurasian continent with a reactor, a cyclotron, everything, and a chain reaction. But then we had the first icebreaker, the first nuclear power plant, the first space installations. That is, you know, the time of the first—we were always the first,” Kurchatov said.
The Russian government has also recently announced that it is in the process of elaborating a new national strategy for space exploration, which will probably be announced in the coming months, possibly weeks.
