Putin guarantees that Russia wants to install a nuclear power plant in space

Russian president says, in election campaign, that installing a nuclear power unit in space is a priority for Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin told government officials on Thursday that space projects, including the installation of a nuclear power unit in space, must be a priority and receive adequate funding, state news agency TASS reported.

Russia “has good skills and, moreover, it even has reserves that we can be proud of, that we can count on in the future”, Putin said during a meeting with government members, pointing as an example to a nuclear energy unit that would operate in the space.

“We need to finance it in time,” Putin said, according to TASS.

“We just need to set priorities,” Putin said, adding that “there are issues that require additional attention.”

“It seems that we are all used to the fact that we have skills that other countries do not have, but we have to pay special attention to them so that they develop and can be used in the future in order to solve the tasks that can and should be solved with the help of these technologies,” Putin said.

The head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, said last week that Russia and China are working on a project to install a nuclear reactor on the Moon, according to TASS.

“We are currently seriously considering a project to take to the Moon and set up a nuclear reactor there, together with our Chinese partners, somewhere between 2033 and 2035,” Borisov said during a youth festival on March 5.

In March 2021, the Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos and the Chinese National Space Administration signed a memorandum on behalf of their governments on cooperation in establishing an International Lunar Research Station, according to TASS.

The news comes after sources told CNN last month that Russia is trying to develop a nuclear space weapon that could potentially cripple a wide range of commercial and government satellites.

This type of new weapon – generally known to military space experts as a nuclear EMP – would create a pulse of electromagnetic energy and a flood of highly charged particles that would hurtle through space to disrupt other satellites revolving around Earth.

The weapon is still being developed in Russia and is not yet in orbit, as officials from Biden’s US administration have publicly highlighted. But if used, officials say, it would cross a dangerous rubicon in the history of nuclear weapons and could cause extreme disruptions to daily life in ways that are difficult to predict.

Top image: Four main components of the Roscosmos segment of the International Space Station pictured as the orbital outpost rose 260 miles above the North Atlantic Ocean in April 2023. NASA