Nano Rush

The Kremlin has found use for petrodollars and gazorublyam - Moscow has allowed them into nanotechnology, which should help Russia catch up with Europe, the United States and China

Maxim Birovash, the latest issue of the journal Correspondent

Anatoly Chubais, the ex-vice-speaker of the government of the Russian Federation, who last year headed the Russian state corporation Rosnano, does not hide the almost Brezhnevian feeling of “deep satisfaction”.
“The time to frighten the whole world with rockets has passed. Now we have other trumps - high technology, which can change our place in the global economy, ”says this person in a conversation with the Correspondent, on whose shoulders the authorities have placed a serious burden: to literally bring the state into a bright future, turning its oil revenues Kremlin chips - nanotechnology.

We are talking about the application in industrial production of scientific methods of work with the constituent elements of any substances on Earth - molecules and atoms.
Using a scanning probe microscope or plasma setup, as well as other instruments, at ultra-low temperatures, in vacuum or in ionized gas, nanotechnologists change the atomic or molecular structure of materials and chemical elements. Sometimes this is done in supramolecular chemistry, and no tools are needed at the same time - scientists are trying to ensure that the molecules themselves are arranged in the desired structure. So nanomelitsy receive a whole range of new materials: ultrathin films, carbon nanotubes and much more. As a result, you can, for example, get a fabric that literally will not be demolished, or grow a human organ.
“The changed structure of the atom can change the properties of a product, and the sale of such a product can change the entire global economy,” says Chubais. According to him, the range of application of nanotechnology is unusually wide: from nuclear energy to consumer goods.
About the place of Rosnano in the Napoleonic plans of the Kremlin This is evidenced by the fact that during the first public presentation of the corporation at the international economic forum in St. Petersburg in June of this year, President Dmitry Medvedev himself represented it. “Nanotechnology is the yellow jersey of the leader in the new global economy,” he said from the rostrum. “And we hope to wear it for a long time.”
With such high patrons, the corporation has no problems with financing: the purse of Rosnano, which forms the Russian government, today holds about $ 3 billion. This is more than the total budget of all RF research organizations combined. At the same time, the financing of Chubais's offspring is increasing year by year.
In addition, the leadership of Rosnano now plays the role of dispatcher of funds allocated to scientific programs in the country.
However, the task of the corporation is not just to spend these funds, fully funding scientific research and bringing them to practice. Rosnano acts as a co-investor in such projects, attracting external capital in them under state guarantees.
At the forum, Medvedev also announced the creation of a special science campus in the Moscow region of Skolkovo. The Russians will be helped in this endeavor not by anyone, but by specialists from the Massachusetts Technological University, whose scientists at one time founded the legendary Silicon Valley in the USA - a platform for the development of IT technologies. “It will be a starting complex for ideas that will become the basis for the Russian economy in the future,” the Kremlin’s owner does not doubt.
“If Russia has its own Silicon Valley, a high-tech development settlement, this will be a strong bid for world economic leadership,” said James Reni, senior executive director of Intel Corporation, to the Correspondent.

Chubais's light bulb

Mikhail Ananyan, President of the Russian National Association nanoindustry, compares the fascination with the latest technology with the legendary BAM, which was built by the whole country. Now something similar is happening, but not beyond Baikal, but in research centers.
The words with the prefix “nano” found almost magical meaning in the vast Russian expanses: huge amounts of money are being pumped into nanotechnologies, in most technical universities they open nanoengineering faculties, and the engineers who have already been released are massively retraining to nanotechnologists generously supported by the state.
The fruits of these efforts have already begun to appear. For example, in the near future, control chips will disappear in Russian supermarkets. Instead, all products will be marked with the product of Chubais and Co. - a generator of radio frequency tags. According to Ananyan, the tests of the novelty were successful, and when the retail chains will use it, they will save about $ 1.5 billion on chips.
The second in scope to the Chubais nanoproject will be an action in which communes of all major cities will replace incandescent bulbs with energy-saving LED nano-bulbs. The government gave the go-ahead to conduct this experiment, and St. Petersburg enterprises in the beginning of the year released the first batch of “Chubais light bulbs”. The project budget is about $ 350 million, its payback period is almost three years.
However, the main achievement of Rosnano, to which the largest medical companies in the world have already paid attention, was the serial production of heart valves from nanomaterials that do not require replacement throughout the patient's life. Project costs amounted to $ 500 million - a hitherto unattainable amount for the development of Russian medicine.
This year, Chubais and his guys began to make nano clothing, the material of which does not require traditional care and does not wear out for decades.
In addition, technologists are on the verge of creating an artificial material similar to bone tissue. “As a result, his own shirt becomes not just closer to the body, but almost one with it,” says Ananyan.
A similar technology is being developed in the interests of the military. A group of scientists from Switzerland, China and Russia has developed a method by which the strength of an ordinary T-shirt is greatly increased. The secret is that the cotton of its fabric is connected to boron, the third element in hardness of the periodic table. As a result of this “union,” says Ananyan, ordinary clothing turns into a lightweight bulletproof vest. In early 2010, the developers of the miracle armor already received orders for $ 500 million from departments of the interior and private security agencies from almost all of Europe.
And international giants - AMD and Intel - this year have invested in a project for the production of flexible printed circuit boards made of polymer on the basis of the Russian Micron plant, which is not inferior in strength to metal, but much lighter than it. The volume of investments in the project is $ 1.5 billion, and Rosnano will receive 49% in it.
Although the implementation of the announced Rosnano projects, despite the generous government funding, not all Russian scientists believe. “Ideas of nanoRussia are suitable only for fantastic stories. All this is reminiscent of the banal pumping out money from the budget, ”said Professor Sergei Abramov, a former employee of the IV Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. In his opinion, most of the projects announced in the conditions of a catastrophic brain drain from the country are impracticable, and the rest are simply pseudoscientific.
He confirms his thought with the data that for some projects the state corporation needs such operations with atoms of materials for which modern science has not yet created the necessary tools. “And so if someone talks about eternal socks and shirts, then, most likely, it’s about an improved technology [fabric production], but the nanoscale has nothing to do with it,” says the professor.

Who is this nano?

However, not only officials but also investors vote for the nano.
The course on nano led to the mass appearance of venture investors in Russia, investing exclusively in new technologies. It is not surprising: according to Ananyan, the profitability of investments in innovations is incomparably higher than the returns on investments in the traditional economy - 110% versus 25%. Since 2008, the volume of investments in Rosnano’s development has grown from $ 300 million to $ 1.8 billion. It has been heating investors' interest and the promise of the Russian president to abolish all taxes on long-term venture capital investments since 2011.
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Medvedev brought similar preferences from a trip through the legendary Silicon Valley, where he met with the leadership of Apple, Cisco, Google and Twitter, which originated as student scientific societies and now have grown into global holdings.
According to John Preston, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was under tax benefits that $ 80,000 invested by investors in the construction of Silicon Valley in 1958 turned into assets worth $ 30 million in a decade (1967). Today’s capitalization has appeared in IT Valley -Companies is worth billions of dollars. “You can warm some unemployed electronic engineer in your garage, and in a year he will make you a multimillionaire,” Preston laughs, explaining the way the American IT dream comes true.
The history of Silicon Valley does not allow Russian state officials to sleep peacefully, and the country's leadership is ready to build its own “valley” - the largest scientific center for nanotechnology in the village of Skolkino near Moscow. There, the authorities are planning to locate branches of leading scientific institutions, the Court of Intellectual Rights of the Russian Federation and a supercomputer capable of solving various tasks for which the government of Vladimir Putin has already allocated $ 2 million.
All this activity has led to the fact that the Russian business has turned its attention to nanoprojects turned its attention to Russian business, which is not inclined to invest in innovation. In particular, the largest entrepreneurs showed interest in this topic - Viktor Vekselberg (the state, according to Forbes magazine, $ 6.4 billion) and Mikhail Prokhorov ($ 13.4 billion).
And the last person in Rosnano is already his own: it is Onexim (the Prokhorov group of companies) together with Rosnano launched a project for the production of LEDs that can effectively replace conventional light bulbs.
Rosnano also has another capitalist in his office - Oleg Deripaska, the owner of Rusal Corporation, whose fortune Forbes estimated in 2010 at $ 4 billion. He is interested in setting up a joint venture for the production of high-quality and cheap electrodes for the needs of his aluminum industry, which has gone bad in crisis.
Foreign investors have lined up in line with the stronghold of nano-engineers for the Russian rich - international computer corporations Intel, Cisco and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who together are ready to invest about 3.5 billion euros in these projects.
According to Chubais, the global market for nanoindustrial products is approaching an unprecedented amount of $ 1.1 trillion. “Now the most insane ideas in nanotechnology have become the beginning of a new round in the development of the world economy,” he says.
Chubais is ready to bite off a solid piece of this ever-growing pie. After all, if the current pace of development of this market does not decrease, then, according to analysts of Research and Markets, its volume in four years will be a record $ 1.6 trillion. At the same time, experts say, new players, including Russia, will provide a serious contribution to this new explosion.
“We are not going to become one of the wagons of this nano train. We have enough strength to become his locomotive, ”Chubais is sure.

Source: Journal Correspondent, №25.

ps: I would not want it to work like this: