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Russia's Kurchatov Scientific Institute resumes its work to create nuclear power installations for distant interplanetary flights. It was Russia that made a breakthrough in the field of space nuclear power at the beginning of the 1980s when Russian scientists created a small-sized space installation known as Topaz. "It was much more effective than foreign analogues in terms of technical and operational characteristics. We used enriched uranium as fuel," says Mikhail Kovalchuk, the director of the Kurchatov Institute. "We are not simply competitive in the field of power installations. We are actually pioneers. Very few organizations have such technologies. Americans were really surprised to see our Topaz installations. They haven't seen anything like that before."

At the start of the Cold War, Stalin chose one of the furthest outposts of his empire to test the Soviet Union's first nuclear bombs. Sixty years on, their cancerous legacy is still being felt. Jerome Taylor reports from Kurchatov Nemytov Oleg, a radiologist at the National Nuclear Centre checks is Geiger meter at the epicentre of the first nuclear test conducted by the Soviets on 29 August 1949. Walking through the flat and endless Kazakh steppe, Nemytov Oleg suddenly stops, fumbles in his desert camouflage trousers and pulls out a Geiger counter. The device bleeps into life. He peers pensively at the reading. When we got out of the car it read 3. Now, within a couple of hundred yards, it has jumped to 10. He unwraps breathing masks and two pairs of disposable shoe coverings. "If we want to go any further we will have to wear these," he says. Further along the dusty road he checks his device once more. "You see, the meter is now reading 21," he says. "If we were in a city far away from here it would read about 0.1. The radiation increases very quickly."