KALUGA, October 18 (RIA Novosti). A technology park, which will develop and promote state-of-the-art technologies, is to open in Obninsk in the Kaluga Region. The region was chosen for the pilot project because Obninsk has many research and development institutes and centers conducting nuclear, space, hydrometeorological, geophysical and medical studies.
The technopark will consist of two sectors with a total area of 60 hectares. The first sector in north Obninsk is part of the city's State Technical University for Nuclear Power Engineering and is planned to become the technopark's business center. It will feature a business incubator zone, an equipment area, a regional exhibition hall, presentation and meeting rooms, as well as office and laboratory buildings.
The center will also have a hotel and social infrastructure, such as health and fitness centers.
The technopark's management said Sector 1 would become a versatile territory for the development of innovation projects in the fields of new polymer and composite materials, nano- and information technologies, control and measuring equipment and automated transfer lines.
Sector 2 will be located in south Obninsk next to the Medical Radiological Research Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. A bioengineering and pharmaceutical production facility will be established there. The huge scientific potential of the Medical Radiological Research Center will be used to develop new medications and technologies.
The technopark will feature the complete chain for marketing up-to-date bioengineering and pharmaceutical products, i.e. scientific research, experimental-clinical tests and commercial production.
The Kaluga Region's government said it had already received 17 applications from companies interested in using the technopark's production facilities.
Investment in the technopark amounts to 4,275,650,000 rubles ($158.83 million). Local enterprises, due to attain design capacity by 2011, will turn out 13 billion rubles ($482.91 million) worth of products. Over 2,000 new jobs will be created.
Obninsk, a city in the Kaluga Region, was established as a nuclear research center in the 1940s. The world's first nuclear power plant was built there in 1954.
The city, a major national research center, is home to the Institute for Physics and Power Engineering, which tackles problems of the nuclear power industry. The Medical Radiological Center, the world-famous R&D Institute of Hydrometeorological Information, the Experimental Meteorology Institute, the seismology laboratory of the R&D Institute of Terrestrial Physics and other research centers are also located there.-0-
