OREANDA-NEWS. On 25 March 2008 was announced, JSC “Tvel” and Russian Scientific Center “Kurchatovsky Institute” signed an agreement aimed at commercialization of technologies for energy and industrial needs.

Tvel management delegation headed by the President Yuri. Olenin had a discussion with representatives of the Direction of RSC “Kurchatovsky Institute” headed by the Director of the Center, RAS Corresponding Member M. Kovalchuk. During the meeting the parties exchanged information regarding wide range of scientific and technical activities currently underway.

Tvel and RSC “Kurchatovsky Institute” are linked with a long standing partnership, in particular, in the field of ensuring and confirming the safety of various reactors, increasing its operational reliability and economic effectiveness, improving fuel cycles.

The signing of the agreement will provide a new impetus to further bilateral cooperation. The signing was preceded by preparatory of experts of both parties that resulted in stipulation of the main joint activities at the present stage:

-joint works on enhancing reliability, safety and economic effectiveness of fuel and fuel cycles of NPPs of low, medium and high power;

-commercialization of production of superconductive materials created for ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project;

-problems of isotopic enrichment of feed and reprocessed uranium, including laser excitation technologies ;

-prospects of application of pure hafnium compounds and their production on Tvel plants;


In particular, the creation of production and technology complex on the basis of Tvel enterprises for manufacturing high and low temperature superconductive materials of new generation, high-strength electric wires, and thermocouple wire. To enter the external market where the fields of sales and application of a number of materials were already divided it it necessary to improve significantly the correlation “price – quality” of domestic products. There are serious prerequisites for that, joint physic and technological approaches (including nanotechnologies) to solving of the problem to enhance characteristics of superconductors.


The Parties also agreed to arrange a number of joint seminars involving employees of Tvel and RSC “Kurchatovsky Institute” on a number of pressing problems of the country energy development.