Russia Unveils Plan for More Atom Plants : Energy: The Kremlin aims to build 31 new reactors before 2010. But economic woes and fears of another Chernobyl disaster may slow the pace.

MOSCOW — Seven years after the world’s worst nuclear accident halted atomic power development throughout the Soviet Union, Russia unveiled an ambitious but controversial plan Friday to ease its growing energy shortage by resuming construction of nuclear power reactors.

The plan aims to nearly double Russia’s output of nuclear energy, which now generates 5% of its electricity, by building 31 new reactors before the year 2010. It was signed without publicity Dec. 28 by Russia’s new prime minister, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, despite strenuous objections from President Boris N. Yeltsin’s top environmental adviser.

Now it is certain to face resistance in the Russian Legislature, which will be asked to approve $73 million for the initial stage of the project in a year of extreme economic hardship. It also will be opposed by neighbors of at least some of the new reactor sites.

Since the 1986 explosion of the Chernobyl power plant in next-door Ukraine spewed radiation across Europe and poisoned thousands, environmentalists here and in the West have called for closing other Soviet-era atomic plants, arguing that outdated technology makes them equally dangerous.

At the same time, Russia’s Atomic Energy Ministry, which inherited most Soviet power plants after the Soviet Union fell apart in late 1991, has worked to repair some of the hazardous reactors as well as its battered political influence.

Pro- and anti-nuclear forces came to a showdown at a Dec. 24 Cabinet meeting. Chernomyrdin, arguing that Russia needed to export more oil and gas to survive its post-Soviet economic turmoil, called for and won approval of the nuclear construction plan, which had been months in the making.

Yeltsin adviser Alexei V. Yablokov called the plan “unacceptable from the legal, ecological, economic and political points of view,” according to a leaked transcript of his remarks to the closed meeting. He said it would spur inflation at a time when Russia should save energy by shutting down inefficient factories, and would violate legal curbs against locating plants too close to cities and large bodies of water.

Greenpeace representatives in Moscow distributed Yablokov’s statement to news media along with lists of hazards at some proposed sites. For example, it noted that the government is pushing plans to build three fast-breeder reactors at Siberia’s proposed Yuzhnouralskaya power station, despite the discovery of a geological fault underneath that prompted nearby residents to vote 3 to 1 against the project in a 1991 referendum.

The plan also calls for completion by 1995 of three reactors whose construction was halted by the Chernobyl disaster. The facility at Kursk, near the Ukrainian border, will have a water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor--the kind that blew up at Chernobyl.

Facing such criticism, Russia’s custodians of atomic power--aging veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry--held a news conference Friday to announce the plan and defend it.

Yevgeny Reshetnikov, deputy minister of atomic energy in charge of new plant construction, said the program is aimed at easing critical energy shortages in towns too small or remote to sustain fuel-fired power stations.

He emphasized that affected towns and environmental experts will get a chance to reject the plan. “We don’t come uninvited,” he said. “No nuclear power plants are being built anywhere in the country against popular will.”

Russia’s existing nuclear plants have been upgraded since Chernobyl and certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Reshetnikov said, and the new generation of reactors are at least as safe and reliable as any in the West.

Rejecting Western criticism of Russia’s program, he said the new reactors were developed without Western aid after Western nations offered to help modernize Russia’s plants but delivered little. Even so, he said, Russia is open to foreign investment in its nuclear expansion.

Another energy official, Alexander Lapshin, told reporters that the Chernobyl-type reactor at Kursk is undergoing “drastic changes that completely remodel the part that caused the accident.”

Russia will also build a new plant a Sosnovy Bor, near St. Petersburg, where a leak from a Chernobyl-type reactor last March spread alarm but no significant radioactivity in the nearby Baltic and Scandinavian countries. Those nations have voiced serious concern about the Russian atomic program, which registered 205 sudden shutdowns of its reactors last year.