LARGE power development programme is being carried out in the USSR. We have diverse natural power resources in Siberia: vast and easily accessible coal deposits and good conditions for building cascades of huge hydroelectric power plants. These natural conditions make it possible to produce in Siberia cheap hydroelectric power and, on the basis of stripping coal, cheap electric power and heat. A power system with an annual output of some 250,000 to 300,000 million kWh is to be set up in the area of the Angara-Yenisei Basin in the next fifteen to twenty years.
However, much of the Soviet Union's population and industries in now concentrated on the plains of its European part. Here, the cheap water resources will soon all be put to use, and coalmining and transportation will become more and more costly, while the rapidly growing industries and agriculture will demand an ever increasing supply of electricity and heat.
The available resources are sufficient for some decades to come. In the more distant future, however, atomic energy may turn out to be a practically inexhaustible and relatively cheap source of abundant power in the European part of the USSR.
We aim to develop atomic power production, which at least in the conditions of the European part of the USSR, will be more economical than coal power. It is clear that atomic power can be economically produced only at large atomic-power plants.
The construction of large atomic-power plants and their operation will also make it possible to determine which of the installations are most harmless and safest for the surrounding population. The economic characteristics and these data will determine the type of atomic-power stations and the scale of atomic-power development in the period 1960-1970.
In the five-year period 1956-1960 we plan to build five experimental atomicpower stations. The atomic-power stations will be put into operation beginning with the end of 1958; some of them will start operation in 1959 and in 1960.
Two stations will be equipped with water-moderated and cooled thermal and epithermal 200,000-kW reactors, and 70,000-kW turbines using saturated steam of about 30 atm pressure.
Another station will be equipped with graphite-moderated steam and watercooled reactors of the type used at the first atomic power plant of the USSR Academy of Sciences, on which a paper 'was read at the Geneva Conference by Prof. BLOKHINTSEV. Each reactor will produce steam of about 90 atm, superheated to 480-500ยฐC for feeding turbines of 200,000-kW total capacity.
The third type of atomic-power plant will have a heterogeneous heavy-watermoderated and gas-cooled reactor. At the New York National Conference last * A lecture delivered on 25 April 1956 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, England.