Russia has set out plans to commission around 30GW of new nuclear generating capacity, with President Putin positioning the sector as central to the country’s long-term energy security and its ambitions in export markets.

Speaking in late August at a videoconference meeting on the development of the nuclear industry, Putin said the programme – which includes SMRs– would ‘not only replace power units that are set to reach the end of their life cycle, but will also help substantially increase the overall nuclear power generation capacity’.

Nuclear currently accounts for about 20% of Russia’s electricity, a share the government wants to grow to 25% by 2045. New plants are earmarked for the Urals, Siberia and the country’s Far East, which Putin said would deliver ‘affordable, clean energy’ while underpinning regional development and energy-intensive industries, from deep processing of natural resources to data centres and artificial intelligence.

Putin described Russia as ‘perhaps the only country in the world to have competencies across the entire nuclear energy chain’, arguing that this advantage had made it a leader in building plants abroad. He set out priorities spanning the serial construction of standardised reactors, a secure and circular fuel supply, skills and a ‘sustainable financial model’ for the industry’s growth.

On fuel, Putin said Russia ‘must work to strengthen our own resource base, conduct geological exploration and develop deposits’, and pressed for wider use of closed-cycle technology that allows spent fuel to be reused. He also stressed the need for a ‘line of standard power units that can be assembled in series, on a production-line basis’ to bring down costs.

Fleet renewal and new reactors
Alexei Likhachev, Director General of Rosatom (the state-owned company that manages the Russia’s entire nuclear industry, including civil nuclear power, nuclear weapons and the nuclear icebreaker fleet) told the meeting that Russia operates 34 units at 11 nuclear power plants, with output exceeding 218TWh in 2025. Facilities include the Akademik Lomonosov floating nuclear power plant, with two reactor units, in the Arctic port of Pevek in Russia’s Far East, and the six units at the Zaporozhye plant in Ukraine, which is under Russian control and currently in cold shutdown.

Over the next decade, 13 ageing units – more than 10GW of capacity, or a third of the operating fleet – are due to be decommissioned. Under the General Scheme for the Placement of Nuclear Facilities, approved in December 2024 and running to 2042, Russia plans to build 38 new units and increase nuclear’s share of generation from 20% to 25% by 2045.

Likhachev highlighted Russia’s VVER-1000 and VVER-1200 reactor designs, describing them as ‘the bestselling models on the global market’, and noted that the optimised VVER-TOI at Kursk is now the country’s most powerful unit at 1,250MW. He also pointed to medium-capacity VVER-600 reactors and small modular designs based on the RITM-200 marine reactor, adding that such units ‘are produced in series only in Russia’.

Likhachev also said that work is advancing on next-generation systems, including the sodium-cooled BN-1200 reactor at Beloyarsk and the lead-cooled BREST-300 at Seversk, where a pilot complex is due to start up by 2030. He noted that Seversk will ‘close the nuclear fuel cycle’ with both a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facility and a fresh fuel fabrication facility located on the same site.

Export ambitions grow
Internationally, Rosatom is building 28 units across nine countries, with projects under way in India, China, Türkiye (Turkey), Egypt, Iran, Bangladesh, Hungary, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In Uzbekistan, the company broke ground in June on what Likhachev called ‘a unique project of a global scale’, combining two small reactors and two gigawatt-scale units on a single site.

The corporation has also signed agreements for a further 17 units in six countries – most recently an intergovernmental deal with Vietnam – and is in negotiations with 15 more. Its stated target is to build around 50 reactors under such agreements, spanning a ‘balanced mix of large and small’ designs.

Rosatom is also working with partners on research reactors and nuclear science centres, with projects under way in Bolivia and Vietnam, and is pressing ahead with controlled thermonuclear fusion, preparing a tokamak with the Kurchatov Institute in what Likhachev called ‘the most knowledge-intensive sphere of nuclear energy’.

Likhachev also called for federal standards to be updated to keep pace with new technology, but ‘without any risk to safety’.