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The availability of resources and the ecological advantages of operating with no serious accidents are motivating studies of the possibility of the development of large-scale nuclear power production in Russia in the next century. The conditions for such development are greater safety of modern reactors and switching in the future to inherently-safe reactors as well as a substantial decrease in the activity of the finally buried wastes, in the limiting case down to .he activity of the uranium employed. The difficulties and the problems of nuclear power are solvable, but the desirability of improving nuclear power production and developing an infrastructure should be tied to a need for a substantial increase (approximately ten-fold) in capacity and the relative contribution of nuclear power to the production of electricity up must be increased to 30% in order to limit the increase in the consumption of fossil fuel in the next century.The reserves of depleted uranium (200 thousand tons) and natural uranium (600 thousand tons) are sufficient for longterm (3-4 thousand years) operation of large-scale nuclear power with a total capacity of 300 GW(e), which gives 2 kW per capita with internal use of electricity.This paper examines the fuel supply for nuclear power and the choice of ways to handle long-lived high-level wastes.Variants of the Nuclear-Power Development. We shall consider the handling of high-level wastes for three possible variants of the development of nuclear power with self-provision of fissioning materials on the basis of the following reactors:Yale-1 --improved safety, burnup and breeding of fuel in modern designs or greatly advanced designs of the near future: fast BN-800 reactors and thermal reactors (AST and others), for example VVI~R-1000 [1, 2] (Fig. la);Yale-2 --improved inherently-safe BREST-300 [3] and thermal VVI~R-1000 (both variants of development with substantial utilization of natural uranium) (Fig. b); and, Yale-3 --fast-neutron reactors without utilization of natural uranium in the initial fuel load; in this variant, BN-800 reactors are developed first, their development stabilizes at 1/3 full capacity of the nuclear power production, and the development of second-variant reactors starts (BREST-300 and VVI~R-1000) up to 2/3 total capacity, after which at constant capacity the BN-800 reactors are decommissioned and the final, second-variant reactors are finally put on line (Fig. lc).The last two variants of nuclear power, where the BREST-300 reactors, whose safety is based on the laws of nature and in which serious accidents are eliminated deterministically, comprise the basis of nuclear power production for a historically long period of time (thousands of years), are preferable from the standpoint of the low probability of serious accidents. At the same time, the inherently-safe reactors still require final design adjustments and testing. On this level, the first variant, based on existing types of reactors but with reactor safety increased up to the maximum possible level, is preferre...

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The results of investigations performed by specialists at Research and Design Institute of ElectricalTechnology together with other enterprises, institutes, and organizations concerning the formulation of a strategy for the development of nuclear power in Russia in the first half of the 21st century are presented. The individual stages of the work, key assumptions, ideas, and recommendations, on which the strategy is based, the initiatives which the President of the Russian Federation advanced at the millennium summit held at the United Nations, and the international INPRO project initiated by Russia are examined. It is concluded that innovative development and a transition to building as quickly as possible nuclear power objects that meet the requirements and demands of the new century are necessary.The energy component of nuclear technology began outside the framework of the plans developed for energy construction in the USSR. The first nuclear power plant in the world was built in response to the political problem of competing with the West for leadership in projects selected for this purpose. It did not open up either a technological line for energy construction, since it was not a step in the implementation of a government program. Ten years separated it from the next step -the commissioning of the first power generating units in 1964 at the Novovoronezh and Beloyarskaya nuclear power plants. The first domestic dual-purpose reactor ÉI-2 was built as part of a defense program, and its energy component was no more than an ancillary problem. Both reactors were built at Research and Design Institute of Electrical Technology under the leadership of N. A. Dollezhal. The efforts of I. V. Kurchatov, under whose initiative, by a decision of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the first power generating program was adopted back in 1956, turned out to be futile, and all projects were cut back even in 1959.The country returned to planning a nuclear power only in 1966, adopting one program after another, never completing any one of them. However, in the context of the present article it should be noted that all programs were based on an analysis of energy and economic needs. A discussion of the technological problems was the fate of sporadic scientific councils, which sometimes occurred primarily at the I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy or the Physics and Power Engineering Institute. Public appearances by leaders of the industry did not remain unnoticed by the scientific community. An example is the report by A. P. Aleksandrov at the seventh world energy conference in Moscow [1] or the paper by N. A. Dollezhal and Yu. I. Koryakin in the journal "Kommunist" [2]. The former was the basis for active expansion of geological exploration for uranium, and the latter was the first to raise the question of the desirability of concentrating all ener-

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