Promoting Safe, Secure, and Peaceful Growth of Nuclear Energy: Next Steps for Russia and the United States

Russia, the United States and other countries must cooperate to enable large-scale growth of nuclear energy around the world while achieving even higher standards of safety, security, and nonproliferation than are in place today. This will require building a new global framework for nuclear energy, including new or strengthened global institutions. The Belfer Center's Managing the Atom (MTA) Project and the Russian Research Center's Kurchatov Institute developed these and additional recommendations in a new collaborative report, published this month. The report's authors and project co-directors, Matthew Bunn, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Principal Investigator of MTA and Vyachevslav P. Kuznetsov, Scientific Secretary of the Academic Council at the Kurchatov Institute led a multi-national team of more than a dozen experts in developing the report and its recommendations. The report begins with an outline of the world's energy challenges in the 21st century, the potential role of nuclear energy in addressing these challenges, and the issues that must be addressed if nuclear energy is to play a major role in meeting the world's 21st century energy needs. The report continues with a description of the special role that Russia and the United States can play in the future of nuclear energy.