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Floating Nuclear Power Station
angrysponge writes "
Russia to Build World's First Floating Nuclear Power Station for $200,000. I don't know what impresses me more, the engineering chutzpah or low-ball pricetag." From the article: "The mini-station will be located in the White Sea, off the coast of the town of Severodvinsk (in the Arkhangelsk region in northern Russia). It will be moored near the Sevmash plant, which is the main facility of the State Nuclear Shipbuilding Center. The FNPP will be equipped with two power units using KLT-40S reactors. The plant will meet all of Sevmash's energy requirements for just 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt. If necessary, the plant will also be able to supply heat and desalinate seawater."
What happens when there is a melt down? You can't stop water from spreading to the rest of the world.
Funny that I can't find the word "safety" in the whole article.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I beg to differ. Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines would be the first...
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Three Mile Island was hardly a disaster, and Chernobyl was a plant with a horrifically poor design by modern standards.
Just because you say nuclear energy is a bad idea doesn't make it so -- and of the alternatives, they either do far worse environmental damage or cannot practically be scaled to meet demand.
Do you know anything about current nuclear technologies. You couldn't have a nuclear meltdown if you tried anymore. Plus, with pebble bed reactors, nuclear plants can be practically anywhere.
Many people are against Nuclear plants because of Chernobyl. Did you know that a coal plant releases more radiation outside its walls than a nuclear plant?
I guess it's people like you that are the reason no new plants (in the U.S.) have been built in decades.
How is that possible? You can't even buy a one bedroom condo for that in a major city! Must be a misprint, or due to government subsidy.
is actually very safe. Because of tremendous advances in both safety and efficiency, nuclear power is actually a very viable alternative to fossil fuels for power generation. However, due to very high profile disasters (ala 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl), the American public is deathly afraid of just the idea. In contrast, I know that France supplies a large part of the power through the use of these more modern generators, and to my knoweledge, there have been no problems.
Driving cars will never be completely safe either. The question is whether nuclear power can be made safe enough that the benefits outweigh the risks. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for the layman to evaluate those risks, so we either (i) say (rather illogically) that there are no circumstances where nuclear power can ever be justified; or (ii) have to rely on the word of experts who are usually not impartial.
Right now, in most countries, nuclear power seems not to be justified economically, and (while alternative energy sources usually also have a very negative environmental impact) nuclear power produces some seriously polluting byproducts. If those issues can be addressed, I would definitely be willing to consider the arguments as to the risks.
Nuclear power is not and will never be safe.
By your logic, you must have burned to death this morning when the highly-flamable gasoline in your car spontaneously (1) leaked onto you and your children, and (2) caught fire, killing you almost instantly - because, as we all know - "gasoline power is not and never will be safe."
Also, you can burn to death if you climb into the oven - so we'd better ban them all. Same for power drills, so you won't accidentally give yourself another lobotomy.
My point is that there are a great number of very well designed machines and equipment in our lives that have nasty reactions or principals in their operation. Those devices are, however, designed to contain or negate the hazards.
Coal power plants burn coal and release carbon dioxide, sulphur, soot and - yes, radiation - directly into the air that you breathe. (FYI, coal plants release more radiation from the coal they burn than nuclear plants, which are designed to internalise all radioactive materials). They pollute and contribute to cancer rates by design.
Strangely nobody (ie: you) seems to really care about coal pollution since burning coal on the fire is an understandable technology that someone can do in their own back yard and never killed nobody (except thousands of coal miners over the centuries, but who cares since we can't see them). Unlike nuclear technology which contains the world "nuclear" in the title and will therefore definitely turn large swathes of the country into a post-Little Boy Hiroshima within 15 seconds of being turned on.
But in reality, nuclear power plants are designed to contain radiation (duh). The old designs were still safe by most measures, but modern pebble-bed nuclear reactor designs take it to extremes. (1) they're far simpler than old pile designs and (2) they're *physically unable* to melt down and go critical - even if the cooling fluid is pumped out completely. The electrical output will drop off and will just.. sit there. Happily doing nothing. Aww, lookkit it. It's happy. Wave back.
If you jump naked into the nuclear reactor core, yes, you'd have some fatal health problems - but the same would happen if you jumped into a conventional furnace.
Please get over your irrational fears.
Russia spent the last few decades of its Soviet era dumping spent navy nuclear cores into the arctic sea. I've never heard of any accountability for that egregious poisoning of the most productive biome on the planet. So it's clear that they're learning from their successes.
And any reporter who doesn't realize that a "kilowatt" is a rate of energy over time has zero credibility - they're a PR agent. They're selling nuclear power that's "too cheap to measure", which we all know is the kind of like that sells nukes to people who spend the rest of our lives paying for the construction, security and cleanups.
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make install -not war