ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union’s first civilian nuclear power plants were built in the European part of the country, and especially in the European part of the Russian SFSR. Soviet nuclear system builders then set out to build plants in other union republics, and to export nuclear reactors. We have already seen how the nuclear boom in the 1970s spread to northern Ukraine, where the Chernobyl and Rivne plants started to be erected early on, and to Armenia in the country’s far south. Two more radical projects targeted western Kazakhstan, as already touched upon in Chapter 3, and the Russian Far East, both of which can be regarded as colonial regions. Here, the energy planners at Minenergo and Gosplan proposed nuclear projects as “tools of empire,” to use Daniel Headrick’s term, mobilizing the atom as part of their mission civilisatrice. 108
