Blochintsev attended the Technical College for Industrial Economics and studied physics at Moscow State University from 1926 to 1930.

Among others, he studied with Leonid Mandelstam, Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov, Nikolai Lusin, Dmitri Egorov and Igor Tamm.

[1] He then worked at the Research Institute for Applied Chemistry (NIIPh), where he completed his habilitation under Tamm in 1934 (Russian doctorate).

In 1938 he presented the derivation of the Lamb shift in a seminar, using a similar approach as Hans Bethe later did in his well-known work.

In Dubna, a pulsed reactor (IBR) designed by Blokhintsev in the mid-1950s was put into operation in 1960, followed in 1984 by the IBR-2, as a neutron source for solid-state research.