Russia’s Rosatom Ready to Produce Fresh Water Using Nuclear Energy

RIA Novosti

MOSCOW, September 17 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s Rusatom Overseas, the subsidiary of the Russian state-run nuclear corporation Rosatom, is ready to help fight global lack of fresh water by constructing water desalination facilities abroad, using the nuclear technologies and the unique competence of Russian experts, the company said in a statement Wednesday.

“Foreign customers are interested in getting the best ready-made solution for water desalination with predictable final product cost, especially for mobile (movable) technologies,” the Director General of Rusatom Overseas Dzhomart Aliev, said as cited in the statement published on Rosatom’s website.

According to Aliev, the company is ready not only to construct a desalination facility, but also to operate it and to ensure its financing. “With this approach, our aim is to become leaders in the global nuclear market,” he concluded.

“Russia has unique competencies and historical experience in using nuclear energy to produce fresh water by means of thermal desalination,” Evgeny Velikhov, the Member of the Expert Council on Desalination, the President of Kurchatov Institute and the academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences noted.

The first meeting of the Rusatom Overseas” international Expert Council on Desalination took place on September 17 in Moscow.

According to the statistics, cited in Rosatom’s statement, about two billion people in the world suffer from water scarcity and in the decades to come the problem is expected to get worse, as the population of the regions, already experiencing water shortage – Latin America, Africa, Middle East and South East Asia – will continue growing.