The words ‘Chernobyl’ and ‘meltdown’ have flashed repeatedly across newspaper pages over the past few days, not for the reasons we might have anticipated a month ago (in reference to the upcoming 25th anniversary of the disaster, this April) but because the current crisis affecting Japan’s Fukushima plant has invoked comparison with (and in some cases contrast to, depending on how optimistic the outlook) the worst nuclear accident in history.

That event, it would seem, has not deterred Russia a quarter century on from building up a robust nuclear energy industry.  Nor, it would seem, will the current catastrophe Japan is facing.  State run nuclear workhorse Rosatom is strongly backing its existing power projects, with a verbal warning to Bulgaria to sign an agreement to resume construction of a 2,000-megawatt nuclear power plant on the Danube by 31 March, as well as triumphantly overseeing a $9.4 billion nuclear power deal with Belarus, a country which in sad irony suffered immensely from the Chernobyl accident.  The FT considers how Rosatom is rallying the troops for a nuclear survival strategy, relying in particular on faultline-residing Turkey: