I have to confess I have no first-hand knowledge and no understanding of the real significance of that thing I’m about to describe since we are talking about something hi-tech and hi-brow. But Professor Dmitry Vinnik and other experienced Moscow writers on science and technologies are going crazy about that thing, more so because it’s not a series of letters and figures on the screen (as in an “idea”), but something physical and actually operating.
Now, Google-translate help me, we are talking about the fast neutron reactor being completely switched to uranium-plutonium MOX fuel. That reactor is standing at the Beloyarsk nuclear power station, placed in the Urals mountains at the border between Europe and Asia. The switch took several years, but now the totally revolutionary reactor is giving power to consumers.
And that, my friends, means that Russia has achieved a closed circuit of getting nuclear energy, asking for no raw materials like uranium (or oil, or gas). That reactor works on the old stocks of spent nuclear fuel, which is not just abundant, it will last us for several thousand years. Oh, and in the future, there will be no such thing as spent fuel, in need of stocking in some remote places. Every scrap of it will be reprocessed in a closed circuit.
Russia has been paid heavily by many nuclear powers to stock that spent fuel, so now we have plenty. But the next modification of that miraculous reactor is supposed to produce more fuel than originally loaded into it. It’s a bit like inventing a perpetual motion engine.
You wait a bit more, say the nuclear geniuses, it’s still an experiment, you give us more time to perfect it, and then be ready for a completely new world around us.
Theoretically, it will be a world where hydrocarbons will not be needed to produce energy but still be used for making plastic or lubricants or other nice things. That also will be a world where the idea of a green transition will be laughed at. Just imagine: two days ago the government of Germany proclaimed, that the remaining nuclear power stations will be closed down, and the green activists clapped their hands. Hello, Germany is shivering from the cold and hoping for alternative energy sources like Chinese solar batteries to warm them up. Goodbye Germany of world-famous industries.
The mentioned Professor Dmitry Vinnik, with a shy apology for a far-fetched idea, is saying that maybe one of the reasons why the West have started a war against Russia in Ukraine is exactly the long-anticipated technological breakthrough our nation was about to achieve. It’s like the Manhattan project, he says, meaning the American nuclear bomb, something completely upending the whole future world order.
Why so: Russia is years, if not decades, ahead of all possible competitors in that technology. So just imagine anyone on the good side of Russia getting unlimited and very cheap energy, needing no oil and gas, while other guys get nothing of the kind. The target year when that new world may become possible is maybe 2036 or even earlier, according to the same nuclear geniuses who, to their own amazement, have achieved their breakthrough.
By the way, the whole project, comprising at least three types of these totally new reactors, has been named just that: the Breakthrough.
It all happened before, you know. Revolutionary technologies, or at least their massive use, come in huge leaps and bounds, with long empty spaces between them. And when these technologies come along, you better hold on to your hat. Because it somehow happens, that whenever somebody invents something, meant for universal good and happiness, a war or several wars spring up.
Look at what happened in the first half of the previous century. Some of the inventions we talk about have been made in the late 19th century, or in early 20th, and then all of them together rushed out of laboratories and invaded human life. That’s a petrol engine, aeroplane, rocket and atomic reactor, along with plenty of other things in medicine or electronics, like radio or TV.
Human life will now become a pure paradise, the tech wizards were saying. We have made everybody rich and happy. But then, all these mentioned things have evolved into a completely new generation of weapons of war, and the whole world tumbled down, for good or for bad.
I do remember a researcher of technologies, speaking out in our Moscow Cigar Club, saying that for the whole second part of the 20th century humanity was living off these old inventions, only perfecting them on and on. There was nothing totally revolutionary in the marketplace. Then along came the Internet, which you may well consider a true breakthrough for the whole of humanity.
The optimists expected the new Age of Enlightenment to rush in as a result. What really happened, was the immediate turning of the Internet and the rest of IT into a tool of dumbing down the people, essentially into yet another weapon of war, which have changed warfare as an art. A wave of revolts and revolutions started, raised by youngsters, whose ideas came from short messages on their smartphones. And let us not forget the horrors of woke ideology, also channelled through the same gadgets.
I have yet to write a column on the totally new type of war Russia is encountering in Ukraine, but now suffice it to say that many parts of the world is getting a narrative about that war, that has not the slightest relevance to reality. And it looks like that narrative is the main tool of the war, while actual fighting serves as a secondary application to the real information war.
You may ask, exactly how you may turn the absolutely new type of getting your energy into a weapon of war. Same thing people asked about all these innocent-looking cars, planes or rockets. To some evil minds, even the fact of possessing such advantages is becoming a military matter.
The author is a columnist for the Russian State agency website ria.ru, as well as for other publications. Views are personal.
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