General director of Rosatom Sergey Kirienko attends a meeting during the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, 2 October. (c) Aleksey Filippov / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.In 2005, when Sergey Kirienko was put in charge of Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (renamed Rosatom in 2007), he’d never had any experience of the nuclear power sector.
Later to make headlines as Russia’s youngest prime minister, Kirienko’s political career began in 1997, when he became deputy minister of fuel and energy. In 1998, he served as prime minister under Boris Yeltsin for several short months before resigning over the financial crisis that led to the devaluing of the rouble and Russia defaulting on its debts. Now Kirienko is once again at the hub of power, looking after internal political matters.
Kirienko’s successor at Rosatom is Alexei Likhachev, Russia’s first deputy minister of economic development since 2010. Likhachev would seem to be a natural choice for the job — he was born in Arzamas-16, now Sarov, the Russian centre for nuclear research and still a closed city.
