The purpose of the Program is to consolidate a system of organizational-legal and financial-economic measures aimed at state support and stimulation of the use of autonomous energy for the purposes of long-term energy supply to individual regions of the USSR.
The Program makes it possible to form an effective system, consistent with the national interests, goals and priority tasks of the country's socio-economic development, for stimulating the development of autonomous energy as an industry capable of solving the pressing problems of energy supply in the housing and communal sector of remote areas and of the military units located therein, and thereby making a substantial contribution to ensuring the energy, environmental and national security of the USSR;
Within the framework of the Program, energy primarily means the production, transmission over distance and methods of consumption of electrical energy, as well as thermal energy generated and transmitted in the form of various types of heat carriers.
The Program meets such main criteria as:
· focus on maximally satisfying the energy needs of the population and industry, taking into account regional and individual characteristics;
· role in ensuring the national, energy and environmental security of Russia;
· focus on maximally conserving fuel and other resources.
The change of the economic system based on the planned mechanism and public ownership to market mechanisms and private ownership, which affected the deep-seated social problems of society, changed the conditions that determined both the strategy and the practice of energy supply. What in a planned economy seemed correct and effective became unacceptable in a market economy by many parameters.
First of all, the cost and the ability to pay for generated and consumed energy, and consequently both energy sources and methods of delivering energy to the consumer, began to be analyzed by consumers and producers alike.
That is precisely why nationwide electricity supply networks and centralized heat supply systems with extended networks, which supplied consumers with different abilities to pay for the services consumed in the same way, ceased to be fully effective. It became absolutely necessary to ensure accurate metering of consumed energy on a differentiated basis for each individual consumer. The increase in tariffs that occurred under the conditions of a market economy urgently required, first, energy conservation, and second, a reduction of costs, primarily for the purchase of fuel, and hence the involvement of more accessible resources in fuel cycles. "Autonomous" energy, a concept that is not entirely terminologically defined today, is becoming increasingly relevant, uniting all types of energy generators capable of independently and differentially supplying specific consumers.
The systemic development of autonomous energy, as the practice of the reforms carried out shows, is impossible without the participation of the State, which exercises management functions that make it possible to develop all types of autonomous energy by the most effective method.
This Program provides for the possibility of attracting State investments in the creation of small nuclear thermal power plants on the terms of state
ownership of the facilities being created, and recognition of the investor's right of ownership to an agreed portion of the electrical and thermal energy produced by these plants.
The main tasks of the Program are:
· ensuring the innovative development of autonomous energy on the basis of budget financing;
· determining various forms and methods of financial-economic support and stimulation of the innovative development of autonomous energy, the main ones of which should include the provision of State guarantees in accordance with the applicable budget legislation;
· determining at the level of State legislation the issues of State support for the development of autonomous energy will make it possible to ensure guaranteed and priority financing from the corresponding funds of the State budget, determined on the basis of the program of socio-economic development of the USSR for the medium-term (long-term) perspective, as well as other measures of State support and stimulation of the regional development of energy.
The complexity of solving the problem is due to the following factors:
· the low economic attractiveness of developing hard-to-reach areas;
· the absence of a legislative framework stimulating the development of these areas,
· their high energy consumption due to natural climatic conditions,
· the high environmental sensitivity of these areas to economic activity,
· the high costs of ensuring vital activity in these areas, including the cost of construction, production and transportation of products.
Ensuring the vital activity and economic development of the regions of the Far North and the Far East through the development of energy and the maintenance of energy at the proper level is a strategic task of ensuring the national security of the country.
The particular problems of investing in innovative projects for the construction of floating nuclear thermal power plants are as follows.
Russia has accumulated many years of experience in the creation and safety assurance of stationary high-capacity nuclear power plants (from 500 to 4000 MW) operated in the civilian sector of the economy, and experience in the creation of low-capacity nuclear power installations (up to 50 MW) used for the nuclear icebreaker fleet and the nuclear navy.
The economic, technical, technological, operational and organizational requirements for activities related to the creation and use of the named types of installations differ in their tactical-technical and operational characteristics.
For the first time, the task is set of introducing, in essence, large-scale and costly achievements of military nuclear energy into the civilian sector for the development of the economy of remote and hard-to-reach areas on a long-term investment basis with the attraction of non-state funds.
The concentration of resources for the innovative development of energy on the basis of ASMM will make it possible to realize the advantage of the advanced scientific and technical groundwork achieved in the military field by domestic science and technology.
The Program also provides for identifying measures to promote the development of specialized infrastructure for innovation activity in the field of autonomous nuclear power, including information infrastructure that ensures the accumulation and dissemination of information intended for use by subjects of innovation activity.
The main tasks of state regulation of relations concerning the use of ASMM are:
· development of legal, organizational and economic mechanisms stimulating the development of the use of ASMM, the creation of subordinate Acts and other normative-technical documentation and its further improvement;
· management of the use of ASMM through authorized State and regional executive authorities;
· development of the existing material and production base for the use of ASMM;
· development and organization of new production enterprises, research institutions, scientific and testing-certification centers;
· delimitation of competences between State and regional authorities in the sphere of development of the use and ownership of ASMM facilities;
· conducting, in the established procedure, state expert review of projects and programs for the development of the use of ASMM;
· organization and maintenance of statistical reporting on the use of ASMM equipment and installations, and on the volumes of energy production from small-scale power installations;
· creation of environmentally clean zones in places of mass recreation and treatment of the population and demonstration zones for the use of ASMM;
· organization of a licensing system;
· organization of standardization and certification in the sphere of the use of ASMM;
· organization of a domestic market for ASMM equipment and installations;
· ensuring the competitiveness of the USSR on the world market for ASMM;
· organization of, or participation in the organization of, the necessary forms and structures of economic activity, including international ones (federal and international funds, joint ventures, marketing and information services);
Structures of authorities covered by the Program:
· Government of the USSR;
· Ministry of Defense of the USSR;
· State executive authorities;
· organizations and enterprises that are participants in relations connected with the construction and use of ASMM and the electricity and heat it produces.
The Program defines the obligations (including taking into account those previously established) of persons who are participants in relations connected with the innovative development of autonomous (small) nuclear power.
The Program envisages:
· ensuring the establishment of an unconditional and preferential right to sell electricity and heat generated by autonomous ("small") power, at prices approved by authorized state bodies regulating energy tariffs;
· ensuring non-discriminatory access to electrical, and in certain cases also thermal, networks for producers and consumers of electrical and thermal energy, primarily for those independent of monopoly organizations;
· realizing the possibility of concluding long-term bilateral direct contracts, as an integral factor in increasing the investment attractiveness of autonomous power and reducing risks, including inflationary ones;
· realizing the inclusion in tariffs for newly created autonomous energy sources (not only in municipal ownership) of an investment component for the entire payback period of the project.
· introducing the practice of providing consumer credit for leasing (obtaining for use) ASMM.
Taking into account existing experience of legal regulation, including regional and foreign, the necessary legislative and other normative legal framework regulating various aspects of State support for the innovative development of priority sectors and projects is being improved. The measures to improve State and regional Legislation envisaged by the Program will make it possible to create for investors economically attractive, legislatively guaranteed conditions for investing funds in the innovation sphere and the development of knowledge-intensive industries.
The drafting and adoption of a special Law "On State Support for Autonomous (Small) Power" will provide the necessary state guarantees of the rights of subjects of innovation activity in such a strategically important sector for the USSR as autonomous (small) hybrid power.
The task of providing electricity and heat to the regions of the Far North and the Far East in the USSR can optimally be solved at present on the basis of creating in these regions a series of ASMM basing points and autonomous power supply systems that do not depend on the annual delivery of hydrocarbon fuel or on the construction of long power transmission lines.
The transportation of nuclear fuel, in terms of its mass volumes and frequency, is extremely negligible compared with the transportation of hydrocarbon fuel intended for thermal power plants via the Northern Sea Route.
The construction, periodic repair and decommissioning of ASMM is possible under factory conditions, by means of towing floating ASMM from and to the "Sevmash" plant (Severodvinsk), the "Amur Shipbuilding Plant" (Komsomolsk-on-Amur), the "Zvezdochka" plant (Bolshoy Kamen) and have obvious advantages over the construction, repair and decommissioning of stationary power installations, primarily for the ecology of the regions.
The construction of ASMM includes carrying out a complex of production works at a number of industrial enterprises of the shipbuilding, nuclear, metallurgical, electrical engineering and other branches of industry, the construction of special hydraulic engineering structures in the ASMM basing region, the development of regional lines for transmitting electricity and heat to consumers, and the creation of special regional infrastructure to ensure the safe operation of ASMM.
The Program provides for substantiation of the economic efficiency of using ASMM in a specific region in comparison with the use of hydrocarbon energy sources according to the methodology of comprehensive analysis of long-term prospects for the development of the power industry.
The problem of ensuring nuclear and radiation safety, including nuclear non-proliferation in accordance with the International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as it applies to SNPPs, requires a comprehensive approach at the State and regional levels to assessing SNPPs as an object of technical regulation and to developing a system of criteria and practical measures provided for by this Program.
In the Program, the system of criteria and measures ensuring safety for humans and their environment, and the safety of the sustainable functioning of State authorities, is formed on the basis of the concept of socially acceptable risk. A socially acceptable condition in the case of assessing the risk of possible severe accidents (including terrorist acts) with radioactive releases of a catastrophic level is the complete exclusion of such accidents.
In this program, for the first time, the tasks of ensuring energy and environmental security are addressed comprehensively, by a program-target method, incorporating all economic, environmental, social and technical aspects into a specific regional target program for the innovative development of energy based on SNPPs.
A comprehensive solution to the problem of developing autonomous nuclear power and ensuring nuclear and radiation safety within the framework of the Program will make it possible to reduce budget expenditures and private investors' costs by eliminating duplication of the measures provided for in a number of existing programs, to concentrate efforts on solving priority tasks in this area using modern methods and means of analysis and forecasting, and also to improve the long-term strategy of energy development and the ensuring of nuclear and radiation safety of the State.
The approved Program combines the development of all sectors, regional hybrid energy based on low- and medium-capacity nuclear power plants and thermal power plants, infrastructure, environmental, educational, technological, social and other projects, with the aim of satisfying the energy, food, humanitarian, cultural and technological needs of the Great Soviet Sovereign People of the USSR.