Within a few years, an industrial behemoth is to rise from the banks of the Volga river: the world’s biggest aluminium smelter, capable of churning out 1m tonnes of the metal a year, powered by two nuclear reactors.

The company planning the $7bn (£3.4bn, €4.8bn) project is Russia’s UC Rusal, the world’s top aluminium producer. It owns the world’s two biggest existing smelters, at Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Built in the 1960s and 1970s, both were monuments to the Soviet Union’s industrial might, taking their electricity from two of the world’s biggest hydroelectric dams. The new Saratov smelter will be one of Russia’s largest industrial projects since those Soviet days.