Give up the peaceful atom? Rosenergoatom is building the most powerful data center in Russia

Recently, in the West, there has been a tendency to reduce the use of electricity from nuclear power plants for organizing power supply to large enterprises. Russia is still not in a hurry to abandon the peaceful atom and is increasingly paying attention to the development of nuclear power plants and finding opportunities for the most rational use of their resources.

This was confirmed by the news of the construction of one of the largest and most powerful data centers in Russia right next to the Kalinin NPP. This station is equipped with four power units with water power reactors (VVER-1000) with an installed capacity of 1000 MW each, which currently have free power generation resources.
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New project - data center with a capacity of 80 MW. The server farm, according to the project, will be able to accommodate up to 10 thousand mounting racks.

The federal target program “Nuclear power technologies of the new generation for the period of 2010-2015 and for the future until 2020” (FTP NPNP) was initiated by the scientific and technical division of the State Corporation Rosatom (now the Innovation Management Unit). The objectives of the program are: the development of new nuclear energy technologies, the creation of modern research reactors for fast neutrons and new research equipment.

Green and reliable power supply

It's no secret that downtime computing power brings huge losses to owners and their customers, not only financial, but also reputational. To minimize offline care, the organization of a constant supply of electricity to the data center is necessary. Nuclear reactors are an excellent solution, especially when it comes to choosing a source of electricity for the data center infrastructure - after all, the reactors themselves must also operate continuously to maintain efficiency. Such a combination - the data center + nuclear power plant - seems quite logical, even despite the concerns of environmentalists and ordinary citizens regarding the safety of nuclear power plants.



Many major Internet corporations in recent years have made serious efforts to move away from non-renewable energy sources (such as coal and natural gas) in organizing the power supply of their data centers. To do this, they invest in solar farms, wind farms, hydroelectric power stations and even hydrogen fuel cells.

Nuclear energy is also in a sense a “green” alternative to electricity generated from standard dirty coal and gas thermal power plants.

Would the project interest Facebook and Google?

The project will be implemented by the Rosenergoatom concern, which is part of the state corporation Rosatom and the operator of Russian nuclear power plants. The new server farm will be used to provide co-location services for server equipment (collocation). About 10 percent of the usable space and power of the data center will be reserved for the state-owned company, while the remaining data center resources will be available to commercial customers.



The latter (as expected) will include numerous Internet companies like Facebook and Google, which seek to use traditional sources of energy as rarely as possible and at the same time have to bring their business into compliance with the requirements of Russian legislation regarding the protection of customer data. After all, now foreign companies must keep the data of Russian citizens in Russia. Apparently, American companies will have to accept this offer from Rosenergoatom.

Earlier, Rosatom invited Google and Facebook companies to use this platform to transfer personal data of their users to Russia. The proposal was made in connection with the entry into force on September 1, 2015 of the federal law on the storage of personal data in Russia. Rosatom plans to use up to 10% of the data center's capabilities for the needs of its Rosenergoatom concern, everything else will be freely offered on the market.

It should be noted that the concept of placing data centers near power sources cannot be called innovative. Take, for example, numerous hydroelectric power stations in the US state of Oregon, which attract more and more data center operators to the region. But! there have not been such large-scale projects for placing data centers near nuclear power plants.

Advantages of the new data center

The construction site of the new data center is located approximately 200 kilometers north-west of Moscow. This project is estimated at approximately 6.4 billion rubles, this amount has not yet included the cost of IT infrastructure. Completion of work in the framework of its first phase is scheduled for March 2017. Work in the second phase should be completed in the summer of 2018. After commissioning, this 80 MW server farm will be the largest and most powerful in Russia.

The city of Udomlya will become a reliable “refuge” for the new data center. This town is a satellite city of the Kalinin NPP and is located not far from Tver and fiber-optic communication lines between Moscow and St. Petersburg, which provides an additional advantage in the form of reliable and fast communication lines.


Kalinin NPP


The machine hall consists of two levels: at the top there are generators and turbines, at the bottom - condensers, pumps and pipelines.


Turbogenerator


Here, thermal energy is transformed into electrical


Capacitors


On the territory of the Kalinin NPP, as well as on the territories of many other large enterprises, there are several bunkers for temporary shelter personnel in the event of an emergency. Not only can one stay there for several days, but also to monitor the radiation situation on the surface, to maintain communication, including video communication with the outside world. However, environmental monitoring equipment installed in bunkers is in use around the clock and now. You can be calm - the radiation background in the Kalinin NPP and in the vicinity of the town of Udomlya is within the normal range, and it is even lower than in the center of Moscow.


TVEL (fuel element): the main element of the active zone of a heterogeneous nuclear reactor





In addition to a stable power supply using the resources of the neighboring nuclear power plant and the neighborhood with optical fiber, the number of advantages of the new data center should also include free cooling. Due to the geographical location of the new server farm (the temperature average monthly maximum in the summer in the Tver region is about 24 degrees Celsius, and from September to May it is obviously below 20) this technology can be used to cool the servers for most of the year.

To implement the project, Rosenergoatom had to negotiate changes to the rules that regulate electricity prices.

This is necessary to connect the new data center directly to the generating capacity with the possibility of organizing power supply to the northern farm at a reduced rate.

About how this project looked at the level of the idea, the CEO Evgeny Romanov said earlier:

Specifically, for the KAES (Kalinin NPP) ... we are now solving an extremely important task - we are considering an investment project that will include the construction of several buildings near the station, which will be oriented to the Data Center. This is a data center.

First, we are going to focus the racks here, the servers that will serve all the information of the concern, we will continue to suggest that all the data centers associated with Rosatom will be collected here, thirdly, this will allow us to attract such serious organizations on commercial terms like Google, Yandex, who work in Russia. Here we have several components: the first is that we have a minimum set (that is, we, plus a commercial structure) —this is 100 MW, if we, GK and commercial structures are already 200 MW of stable electricity consumption. The obvious thing is that all the electronics that will be concentrated here require heating in the winter, cooling in the summer, and this is a stable consumption of a large amount of electricity.



This is good, but for us it is no longer the main thing. We turn for ourselves not to trade in electricity, but to trade in bits, i.e. with very high added value. And we are already thinking, why don't we even have to sew this Data Center as a mandatory condition in the VVER TOI complex? Then, being engaged in the supply of our power units abroad, we begin to deal not only with the supply of electricity to these countries, but also supply the media and information sources.

Let me remind you that in the modern world wars are not won by cannons and tanks, but are won in the information space. Possess information - you own the world. And in this sense, you will again be on the front line, at the point of attack. And you are no stranger to solve unique problems. You know how to do it. Your team is brilliant. I hope that we can justify this decision. There was already an interim meeting. We have been given a team to prepare the final presentation, within 2 weeks we are entering the leadership of the Civil Code in order to get a decision that we will begin this investment. We have these investments estimated at a couple of billion rubles.

Today, Rosenergoatom operates ten nuclear power plants with 33 reactors. It is planned to increase the number of reactors to 59 units by 2030 already. To support such business expansion, the company needs additional finance, which can be obtained through the construction of a large commercial data center near the Kalinin nuclear power plant.