Russia will develop large-scale scientific projects to rival Europe's Large Hadron Collider, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said.
"Such projects can be comparable to the space or nuclear programs that have been successfully carried out in our country," Putin told a meeting of the government's committee on high technology late Tuesday in the Moscow region.
The Education and Science Ministry has drawn up a list of six potential projects, including construction of a thermonuclear research center and reactor. The cost of the projects could be 133 billion rubles ($4.8 billion), said Deputy Finance Minister Alexander Novak.
The LHC is a 27-kilometer circuit of magnets running under the French-Swiss border that smashes beams of atomic particles to record the resulting collisions. The world's biggest scientific experiment is recording collisions in its hunt for the origin of the universe's missing mass and "dark matter."
Putin viewed a Russian collider under construction in the Moscow region town of Dubna, RIA-Novosti reported.