Named after Soviet nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov, the town was once the centre of operations for the adjoining Semipalatinsk Test Site.
The Kursk Nuclear Power Plant and the neighbouring town of Kurchatov stood in for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and Pripyat for the production of the 1991 American television movie Chernobyl: The Final Warning.
It was launched in the Soviet Union on August 1, 1990 in the Kurchatov Institute in collaboration with DEMOS co-operative (although the engineering team at DEMOS at the time consisted mostly of Kurchatov Institute employees, some key members (Mikhail Davidov, Vadim Antonov, Dmitry Volodin) in the RELCOM team were never employed by Kurchatov Institute).