YAKUTSK, April 10. /TASS/. The project to build small modular reactors (SMR), which is being implemented in Yakutia's Ust-Yansky District, may be used later on across the Arctic, speaker of the regional legislation, Alexey Eremeyev, said.

"We all know that everywhere in the North we are using diesel fuel. This is why Yakutia has joined a project with Rosatom, under which electricity would be supplied to two big settlements in the Ust-Yansky District - the district's center Deputatsky and the Ust-Kaiga settlement. If this experience is successful, and this is a pilot project, <…> then in future small modular reactors could be across the Arctic, not only in Yakutia, but across the entire North," he said.

In 2022, at the Eastern Economic Forum was inked an agreement on cooperation in development of a mineral resource center in Yakutia's Arctic part. The agreement was signed by Russia's Minister for the Development of the Far East and Arctic Alexey Chekunkov, Russia's Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology Dmitry Tetenkin, by Yakutia's Governor Aisen Nikolaev, and Rosatom's Director General Alexey Likhachev. The agreement provides for the development in Yakutia of a comprehensive plan to create a mineral resource center, which would receive electricity from two RITM-200N small modular reactors.

According to Yakutia's governmental press service, electricity would be supplied to the Kuchus gold deposit, to deposits of the Kularsky gold-bearing district, to the Ruchey Tirekhtyakh and the Deputatsky tin deposits, as well as to other deposits developing in the mining cluster in Northern Yakutia.