Well, "radiophobia" is aninternational problem for uneducated people.
Nuclear powerplants produce 100 times less radioactive pollution then ordinary coal powerstations. Look at France - more then 60% of electricity there is produced by nuclear powerplants.
As for me I - just look outside my window at work and see a bunker with one of the first nuclear reactors in the world. It's shut down now, and there is absolutely no danger.
All that "nuclear waste" hype is arised by journalists (most of whom barely can write) and politicians who want cheap publicity.
70 percent of Russia is not populated, and will not be populated in the future.
At Novaya Zemlya there are hundreeds of former nuclear test sites, each one resulting in a cavern 300-500m from the surface, that is absolutely insulated by a million-degrees fire that melted the earth into the glass condition. Millions of cubic meters of perfect containers for any toxic or radioactive waste, that can be sealed for at least million years.
Russia has the most powerfull nuclear industry in the world. Simply let it work, and feed people who are now almost starving because of pro-Western "ecologists" who get their envelops with dollars from American nuclear enterprises.
Miko is right - it's profit. And I hope this profit will be spent on further nuclear research.
BTW, 10-15 years ago at least 4 large projects of fusion reactors were started: Tokamak-15 in Dubna, European thorus in CERN, Japanese and American reactors. Since the start of this "democratisation" crap and the fall of USSR I didn't hear anything about them. Tokamak-15 had to be ready for tests in 1991-92, but I think that even if it was completed - Russian science didn't have any funds for experiments.
Maybe all that projects were "bought" by oil companies and states like Saudi Arabia? In this case I think that Soviet science had a great advantage over the Western world: the progressive research directions couldn't be closed by capitalist "marketing decisions"...