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The Soviets, of course, are making some concessions to safety. In the past, their reactors have been built without the huge, thick concrete containment structures that enclose nuclear plants in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West because, says Yuri Svintsev, director of the Kurchatov Institute's nuclear safety laboratory, "the plants are so safe." But no longer. The No. 5 reactor now under construction at Novovoronezh is being built with a towering concrete container; other new Soviet nukes are expected to have the same feature.
What these plants will not have is the up-to-date instruments and equipment common to Western nukes. The control rooms of many Soviet nuclear power plants look like sets from the 1930s science-fiction film Things to Come, and bear only a passing resemblance to the all-electronic control rooms from which engineers run, say, American or German plants. One of the main switches for the reactor at Obninsk is a double-pole, single-throw knife switch, a device that now turns up in the U.S. only in the laboratory scenes of Frankenstein movies. The Soviets' computer technology is many generations behind that of the West. Their turbines have been plagued with problems and often break down, forcing nuclear plants to operate under capacity.
The combination of lagging technology and overdue interest in safety will probably prevent the U.S.S.R. from meeting its 1980 goals for nuclear power. But these problems have not yet—and do not seem likely to—hurt the Soviets' accelerating campaign to sell their nukes abroad. Offering long-term financing and a package plan under which they supply the fuel and take back the waste, the Soviets already have helped the Finns build a $250 million power plant around a 440-Mw Soviet-built reactor similar to one of those at Novovoronezh. The reactor, which the satisfied Finns have facetiously labeled "Eastinghouse," is the first the Soviets have sold outside the U.S.S.R. Libya has agreed to buy a similar nuclear power plant, and the Soviets hope to sell additional installations and fuel-processing services to other developing nations.
The Kremlin's nuclear push could help close the gap that now separates the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union has a long way to go before it realizes its dream of self-sufficiency and becomes a net exporter of energy. But it need not go very far to dominate the international market in nuclear reactors and power plants. The U.S. nuclear industry is virtually barred from this market by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act and uncertainties about American attitudes toward the atom. Soviet atomic exports face no such obstacles. By the time the U.S. decides to go nuclear, the U.S.S.R. may already be almost there. -