Russia wants to team up with India on fast-neutron reactor project

Russia’s state atomic energy corporation Rosatom has invited India to join in developing next-generation nuclear reactors and to participate in its fast-reactor research project.

About Russia,

Russia also officially known as the Russian Federation is a transcontinental country in Eurasia. At 17,075,200 square kilometres (6,592,800 sq mi) Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one eighth of Earth’s inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with over 146.6 million people at the end of March 2016.

• The European western part of the country is much more populated and urbanised than the East, about 77% of the population live in European Russia.
• Russia’s capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other major urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara.
• Extending across the entirety of northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea.
• It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait.
• The nation’s history began with that of the East Slavs, who emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD.
• Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, the medieval state of Rus arose in the 9th In 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium.
• Rus’ ultimately disintegrated into a number of smaller states; most of the Rus’ lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion and became tributaries of the nomadic Golden Horde in the 13th century.
• The Grand Duchy of Moscow gradually reunified the surrounding Russian principalities, achieved independence from the Golden Horde, and came to dominate the cultural and political legacy of Kievan Rus’.
• By the 18th century, the nation had greatly expanded through conquest, annexation, and exploration to become the Russian Empire, which was the third largest empire in history, stretching from Poland on the west to Alaska on the east.

About the Fast-Reactor Project,

A fast neutron reactor, also known simply as a fast reactor, is a type in which nuclear fission chain reaction is sustained by fast neutrons.

• The multipurpose fast research reactor project, also known as MBIR, is coming up at the International Research Center in Dimitrovgrad, located in the Ulyanovsk region.
• MBIR could become world’s most powerful facility by 2025. And given that such a unique institution with the high neutron flux cannot be realized on a small scale, a high cost is inevitable.
• It is a regional “collective use centers,” in which one reactor can be used by numerous international clients, adding that Rosatom invites its Indian partners to join in and become pioneers in further research into nuclear processes.
• It is noted that Russia has offered India a new range of reactor units — the VVER-Toi (typical optimised, enhanced information) design — for the third and fourth units of the Kudankulam project that being built by Rosatom