the Soviet Union’s industry as a whole, especially the nuclear industry. Eventually, the dissent generated from the Chernobyl incident and the discovery of its lack of safety lead to the shutdown of all RBMK’s in the Soviet Union outside of Russia. Ultimately, the Chernobyl incident was the beginning of the international fear of “using bombs to generate electricity.” On the day of the second anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, Russian scientist Valery Legasov committed suicide. Upon his death, Legasov admitted that scientists had known of the issues of the RBMKs for quite some time, yet political censorship hid knowledge of accidents and problems from even the reactor operators [5]. With this knowledge and the already existing fears of
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Many states within the Union who questioned the reliability or safety of nuclear power either called for their power plants to be shut down or for future plants to be cancelled, whether or not the reactors were RBMK’s or other types of reactors. This was partially due to the growing discontent of the countries within the Soviet Union’s reliance on the Russian economy. From this growing discontent, it lead to a stagnation in the advancement of the Russian nuclear economy, essentially stalling any growth [8]. This would lead to difficulties in Russian nuclear in the post-Soviet era, as the Russian nuclear economy stagnated. Potentially, the failure to construct new reactors after the immediate fall of the Soviet Union can be contributed to the fear of nuclear following Chernobyl. Ironically, this failure to create new reactors may have led to the continuing extensions of the existing …show more content…
The Russia connected its first VVER-1200 to Russia’s energy grid at the Novovoronezh Nuclear power plant in August of 2016. This is the first of 5 VVER-1200s planned for construction by the beginning of the year 2020. The reactors are part of Russia’s advanced third generation of nuclear reactors, which improve upon prior iterations expected service life as well as power efficiency [11]. The Russian Rosatom Corporation, state run corporation acting as the regulatory body of Russia’s nuclear operations, will construct and operate these new reactors [11]. While seemingly facing issues of their own, many prefer the construction of new VVER-1200s to the continuation of RBMKs due to their comparative
Many states within the Union who questioned the reliability or safety of nuclear power either called for their power plants to be shut down or for future plants to be cancelled, whether or not the reactors were RBMK’s or other types of reactors. This was partially due to the growing discontent of the countries within the Soviet Union’s reliance on the Russian economy. From this growing discontent, it lead to a stagnation in the advancement of the Russian nuclear economy, essentially stalling any growth [8]. This would lead to difficulties in Russian nuclear in the post-Soviet era, as the Russian nuclear economy stagnated. Potentially, the failure to construct new reactors after the immediate fall of the Soviet Union can be contributed to the fear of nuclear following Chernobyl. Ironically, this failure to create new reactors may have led to the continuing extensions of the existing …show more content…
The Russia connected its first VVER-1200 to Russia’s energy grid at the Novovoronezh Nuclear power plant in August of 2016. This is the first of 5 VVER-1200s planned for construction by the beginning of the year 2020. The reactors are part of Russia’s advanced third generation of nuclear reactors, which improve upon prior iterations expected service life as well as power efficiency [11]. The Russian Rosatom Corporation, state run corporation acting as the regulatory body of Russia’s nuclear operations, will construct and operate these new reactors [11]. While seemingly facing issues of their own, many prefer the construction of new VVER-1200s to the continuation of RBMKs due to their comparative