– Fundamental physics must be supported by the state

Head of Rosatom Sergey Kiriyenko suggests providing active state support for the fundamental research in the field of physics and the renovation of the infrastructure of research centers and institutes.

The Russian nuclear power engineers have no reason to complain of the lack of state support. The Government has allocated lots of money for NPP construction, nuclear and radiation safety, development of the nuclear weapons complex and applied science.

We have received money for supporting applied research projects but we still have one unsolved problem: a number of our institutes carry out fundamental studies and we have no sufficient capacities for developing them.

The key requirement to Rosatom when it was drafting the federal target program on new technologies was that it should specify practical results. So, we included only the projects where we were sure that the invested money (be it three or three billion rubles) would yield specific results.

But in case of projects requiring fundamental research and in-depth knowledge you can’t assess the final result. As a result, all such programs were removed. We can’t say for sure when exactly the investments in the study of, say, quarks or bionic fields will pay off.

That’s why all of our projects are of applied nature with very little money – in fact, just leavings – given to fundamental science.

It is for the state to support fundamental studies in physics.

Today, this field receives little money. Besides, all these institutes – irrespective of whom they belong (Rosatom, the Russian Academy of Science or the Federal Agency for Science and Innovations) — have one common problem: outdated infrastructure. If research needs hundreds of millions of rubles a year, technical renovation may cost tens of billions of rubles annually. But you can’t invent anything on old equipment.

So, we firmly believe that we need a target governmental program to support such institutes and a special target program to renovate their material and technical base. It is very good that Russia is participating in such big international projects as ITER but all of them are abroad. So, we must do something to have similar projects at home.

If we see that corporate affiliation is bad for science and technical renovation, we must stop trying to capitalize on it.