[8] Kurchatov was founded in 1968 due to the construction of the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant and granted town status in 1983.

[citation needed] It was named after Soviet physicist Igor Kurchatov.

The town of Kurchatov, along with the neighbouring Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, stood in for the town of Pripyat and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the 1991 American television movie, Chernobyl: The Final Warning.

Kurchatov and the Kursk nuclear power plant would play as Pripyat and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant once again in the 2021 Russian film Chernobyl: Abyss.

In what is now Kurchatov in 1943 fighting as part of the Battle of Kursk took place on two separate occasions that summer.