The response of Russian industry and science to Western sanctions was a sharp acceleration of its own technological developments. Rosatom, Roscosmos and a number of other leaders in their industries have shown particularly significant results in the past year. Domestic mechanical engineering displaces imported analogues, including surpassing them in quality.At the end of December 2022, Roscosmos announced that it would attract 50 billion rubles for the construction of two new satellite production plants at once.
Meanwhile, Rosatom announced the delivery of the most important test stand for the development of its Breakthrough project, and Power Machines announced the completion of the assembly and testing of the first high–power gas turbine in recent Russian history. But what about the sanctions that were imposed just to block high-tech development opportunities for Russia? How do they fit in with all this news?
From the very beginning, Western sanctions were aimed not only at causing a quick, instant shock to the economy, but also for the long term – to make it impossible for our country's further technological development. Trying to explain why the "short-range" measures did not work, many Western observers and officials even said: nothing, but the long-term component of sanctions will work. Complex technological equipment of Western production, often without full-fledged Chinese analogues, will soon begin to break down without spare parts and service (also Western). This is where the Russian economy will face a catastrophe.
Gas turbine historyIt would seem that there were risks.
After 2006, 30 gigawatts of combined–cycle thermal power plants were built in Russia: that is, those in which gas turbines serve as the "first stage", and steam turbines serve as the second. And if our country produces steam and produced it itself, then gas is getting worse: under the USSR they were made in Ukraine.
Naturally, after 2014, Ukrainian turbines are not available to us. Ultimately, 70% of these 30 gigawatts are provided with equipment from foreign manufacturers – for example, Siemens. Today, the company not only does not sell new turbines to us, but also does not service old turbines. Without repair and replacement, the bulk of these 30 gigawatts would have been out of service by the end of the 2020s.
However, the Russian state did not even think about such a scenario yesterday. Back in 2018, it was decided to turn Power Machines, a Russian manufacturer of steam turbines, also into a manufacturer of gas turbines. Technologically, this is very difficult: gas turbines rotate several times faster than steam turbines and operate at much higher temperatures of the working fluid (a difference of hundreds of degrees). This means that turbine blades should have a higher specific strength and heat resistance.
By the end of 2019, Power Machines was able to create a design bureau for gas turbines. And by December 26, 2022 – in an unusually short time – the company completed the assembly and testing of the first turbine GTE-170. It is especially noteworthy that almost the entire assembly, as well as the initial test cycle, took place in 2022. That is, in the conditions of the very sanctions that were aimed, among other things, at depriving the country of the ability to produce such complex aggregates.
To understand the complexity of what has been done, we recall: there are ten thousand details in it. And only a part of them can be made by three-dimensional printing technologies. Many, including the most responsible ones – turbine blades, require the creation of special equipment or modification of existing ones for manufacturing. Casting of blades is also difficult on mastered types of turbines, and even more so on completely new ones for our country.
A series of new turbines will begin in 2023, and the manufacturer will reach full capacity – eight GTE-170 per year - by 2025. In the future, the capacity is planned to increase to 12 units per year.
What is especially important: "Power machines" are working quite hard on efficiency. If GTE-170.1 (already assembled) has an efficiency of 34.1% (Siemens GTE-160 had 34.4%), then GTE-170.2, which will be made from next year, will receive an efficiency of 35.1%. 1% efficiency does not sound very significant, but it must be understood that on the scale of the power system this means savings literally billions of cubic meters of gas per year.
The project to create new turbines was not cheap – 0.2 billion dollars, of which a smaller part was financed by the state. However, it will allow Russia to build power plants worth billions of dollars a year and in the future export its gas turbines to foreign markets.
No less important, Russian specialists will serve the produced turbines – that is, there will be no chances to lose their power plants if the leadership of a particular country has not pleased the West enough, buyers of new turbines will not have. Needless to say, this is a significant factor for Vietnam, Iran, India, and, in fact, any other country with an independent foreign policy.
Atomic "Breakthrough"If gas turbine import substitution and export are an important component in the coming years, then nuclear energy looks strategically more important.
Anyway, gas is a limited resource and significantly increasing in price. Nuclear fuel, in principle, looks much more profitable. But it is also more difficult to approach it: technologies are needed much higher. Why?
The reactors existing in the Western world operate on slow neutrons, and even in Russia such systems still numerically prevail. Slow neutrons are well captured only by uranium-235, which is only 0.7% in natural uranium. And if the neutron is not captured by the uranium nucleus, the probability of splitting the atom is low. Consequently, for slow neutron reactors, the fuel base is only 1/140 of all natural uranium.
It suggests a decision to use fast neutron reactors – like the Russian BN-600 and BN-800. Fast neutrons are also well captured by uranium-238 nuclei, that is, the remaining 99.3% of natural uranium. In this case, the fuel base automatically expands 140 times, and then the known uranium deposits will last not for 50 years, but for many thousands of years.
However, there is a caveat: BN series reactors use sodium as a coolant. The problem is that sodium is extremely capricious. In France, the USA and Japan, they tried to build sodium reactors, and in all these countries, due to design and operational miscalculations, there were leaks of it. When in contact with air or water, sodium burns, and in such a way that reinforced concrete structures after such fires are not very suitable for repair. And even if there were no large sodium fires at nuclear power plants in our country, it is almost impossible to convince foreign customers to buy something like this. In addition, BN–type reactors require high enrichment of nuclear fuel with active isotopes - and this goes against the IAEA's wishes to minimize the possibility of highly enriched fuel falling into the "wrong hands".
That is why Russia is working on the Breakthrough project, the key component of which is the BREST–OD-300 reactor. Its coolant is lead. Unlike sodium, it does not burn and at the same time weakly slows down neutrons. Fast neutrons turn the nuclei of the captured uranium-238 atoms into plutonium, and that, in turn, is vigorously divided, giving the energy on which the NPP operates.
Another advantage of the "Breakthrough" project reactors is that they can use not only uranium and plutonium as fuel, but also so-called minor actinides. This is the name of neptunium, americium and curium formed in spent nuclear fuel. These rather exotic substances actively divide and create the bulk of the radiation activity of spent fuel. They are unsuitable fuel for conventional reactors. But BREST can burn up to 80 kilograms of such actinides in one fuel campaign. Considering that they account for almost 3% of the mass of spent fuel, and almost 97% of the "waste" is uranium and plutonium, within the framework of the "Breakthrough" 99% of spent nuclear fuel can be reused – reducing the amount of fuel a hundred times, which then will have to be disposed of.
Have the sanctions affected our country's ability to implement the "Breakthrough"? Judging by the news about the commissioning of the most important test stand for "lead" reactors just in December 2022 and the continuation of the construction of the reactor itself – no. This is not surprising: Rosatom relied on imported components and systems less than all other Russian high-tech companies. Now it has paid off handsomely: he can work on the future of the earth's energy in a calm and confident rhythm.
Space "Sphere"After the events of 2022, it became finally clear that low-orbit satellite Internet is not a whim, but an urgent need.
If not for the mass civilian segment, then at least for the military. Starlink in Ukraine turned out to be a massive means of communication for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the appearance of fundamentally new antennas (suitable for installation on vehicles with speeds up to hundreds of kilometers per hour) also means the possibility of remote control of combat drones anywhere in the world. And about "any point" – this is not an exaggeration. 3271 Starlink satellites (which exceeds 50% of all working artificial Earth satellites) already provide coverage even in the Arctic and Antarctica.
It cannot be said that the US military did not use satellite Internet to control the UAV before. However, traditional providers of such services kept satellites in higher orbits – that is, the control delay was longer, which is acceptable for reconnaissance drones, but not very suitable for shock. It is too difficult to accurately hit a moving target with delays or communication failures. And the total number of global Internet satellites before Starlink was negligible – Iridium had less than a hundred of them.
It is not surprising that Russia is also beginning to actively create its own low-orbit satellite constellation. Moreover, after the appearance of Western sanctions, we are not talking about problems with its implementation, but on the contrary – about its expansion. As the new head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, noted: "That which is immersed in the PCF and the "Sphere"... at the turn of 2030, it is clearly not enough for our consumers. And we will work together with private companies, with the involvement of extra-budgetary funds, to create a more serious grouping... At the turn of 2025-2026, we should produce 200-250 satellites a year instead of 15 today. And by 2030, to reach at least a satellite per day."
And these are not just plans. Yuri Borisov noted that the corporation plans to attract 50 billion rubles of investment in the construction of two new satellite plants at once: one in Krasnoyarsk, and the other in the Moscow region. It is also planned to partner with private companies interested in working in this industry.
Thus, in the coming years, despite the sanctions, Roscosmos plans to increase satellite production by more than an order of magnitude. Importantly, the GLONASS satellites managed to achieve a complete replacement of Western electronics supplies, and other components of the orbital grouping are going in the same direction.
But the plans of the Russian space industry are not alive only by satellites. To quote the same Yuri Borisov: "Now the space group is on the first stage. Secondly, it is necessary to develop scientific space and manned programs... But if you had heard from me that we would not be engaged in science and deep space, because it does not matter – I should have been immediately removed from this chair and sent to sweep the streets."
Here we are referring to the corporation's plans for the Angara rocket, which is gradually entering mass production, and for the so-called nuclear tug, which may be of no less importance in the future. At the moment, Roscosmos is working on its "stripped–down" version - with a megawatt reactor of thermal, not electrical power. In this form, it is not powerful enough to transport people to Mars, but nevertheless it is quite suitable for dispersing research vehicles capable of reaching both Mars and more distant planets of the Solar System.
Aircraft, ships and aircraft enginesOf course, breakthrough projects that are successfully implemented under sanctions are not limited to energy and space.
Flights of the Russian airliner with the MS-21 carbon fiber wing have already begun, for which the domestic PD-14 aircraft engine is being tested. In the fall of 2022, these engines switched from experimental flights on a single MS-21 to installation on the second airliner of this type. Next year, it is planned to actively work on the certification and testing of the "domestic aircraft – domestic engine" communication.
What is important, both the engine and the aircraft have fuel efficiency above the world level, and this distinguishes them from domestic engines and airliners of the Soviet period. A more compact PD-8 engine is also being created, which will be equipped with new "Superjets" instead of engines of French origin that have proved problematic (and now also inaccessible due to sanctions).
Serious work is also underway in the field of shipbuilding: Russia has established the production of tankers of record sizes for the domestic industry, with a deadweight of 114 thousand tons and a length of a quarter of a kilometer. The country is also building the largest (half-kilometer) dry dock for the construction of floating drilling platforms needed for the development of oil and gas fields.
Thus, the expectations of Western partners not only did not work, but they will not work. Not only the decline in GDP this year – amounting to less than 2.5%, with 10-20% expected in the West – did not take place. The "degradation of high-tech sectors", which is so expected on the other side of the ocean, has not taken place either.
The German turbines will be replaced by St. Petersburg ones, satellite electronics of Western production have already been replaced. Shipbuilding, oil and gas equipment, civil airliners – all these areas are characterized not only by import substitution, but also, importantly, by the substitution of imports for equipment with often better parameters.
Judging by the technological success of this 2022 alone, by the end of this decade, the West may be in for an unpleasant surprise. An attempt to strangle the Russian economy with sanctions may end as unexpectedly as similar Western attempts to strangle the Russian military-industrial complex with a blockade of supplies after 2014. That is, the growth of our country's technological capabilities – despite undoubtedly very serious external pressure.
Andrey Borisov
