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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."
.. Perhaps offshoring plants like this and using them to generate hydrogen + power?
Eeentaresting...
What is the advantage of the power plant floating on water? If anything, this will make it more dangerous.
Just out of curiousity, what would happen if something big were to happen in the area of the floating power plant (something like Katrina, etc.)?
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
They've obviously opted not to go with that expensive and heavy lead stuff, and use recycled aluminum foil. :-)
Ignore Alien Orders
Plus, with the sheer low cost ($200,000 for an output 1/50th of that of a normal Russian nuclear power plant...so the cost of these to equal a normal Russian nuclear plant would be $10,000,000) I think that $10 million is less than the cost of a normal nuclear power plant. Perhaps we should look at this design as well, I mean, evalute it for chrissakes!
We put nuclear power plants to sea all the time. Our aircraft carriers, our submarines, for the most part have gone completely nuclear. Why not, the military uses them. Let's take a look at this. 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt...daaaannnnng.
Heck, even if we don't use these as permanant plants, how about having a few of them as floaters, for rent to cities/owners of the power grid as needed? Oh, having an excessive heat wave $CITY ? Here, for $x.xx/kilowatt, with a minimum purchase of $XX,XXX, we'll add power to your grid.
Seriously...let's take a look at this.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Severodvinsk on the White Sea is a major nuclear disaster area. There are a number of nuclear submarine repair sites there. This power plant is probably either a former submarine reactor or built from one.
My wife's uncle used to serve as chief engineer on Soviet and later Russian nuclear submarines. He still lives near Severodvinsk and says that the overall radiation level at those sites is higher than in Chernobyl. He managed to have two healthy children and asked both of them to study and work somewhere else.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
I'm willing to be convinced, but it'll take a lot of work.
Well, I doubt it, although perhaps I am being overly cynical with respect to you personally.
My experience is that all that is required for people to rapidly abandon principle is a steep rise in the expense of maintaining that principle. It's amazing how clever people are about talking themselves into a new universal principle when the old one runs up against sheer basic personal need.
So, let the price of electricity from fossil fuels rise a factor of 10 or so, and I think we'll be amazed at how little work it will take to convince people formerly passionately opposed to nuclear power to accept it.
1) Having floating nuclear powerplants is just an extension and continuation of the Russian practice of using the powerplants of moored nuclear submarines to feed the grid. In this case they left out the sub and kept the powerplant ... instant savings.
... who would do anything like that eh? Come on ... too far-fetched ...), the radioactive material would (probably) stay _inside_ the safety dome. These reactors don't seem to be fitted with such safety domes, especially if they have to float. And if they do ... is that sufficient to ensure structural integrity in case they sink on impact? And what about repairs / clearance if they do eh?
...) are chosen so that leaks won't lead to polluted groundwater ... and ultimately our drinking water. The white sea is already uninhabitable in places because of sloppy practices with nuclear fuel dumping and scuttling nuclear powered vessels. This will just add to it.
...
... changing _anything_ in a nuclear reactor design is something you don't do lightly.
2) I feel that there are serious safety and environmental issues with this approach. Unfortunately the typical way of doing things seems to be to blithely ignore risks until they actually materialise (read: until things go wrong).
2.a) First issue: containment in case of leaks or accidents. Land-based reactors (in the West) are built with a concrete safety dome. This is to ensure that even if someone were to drop a big fuelled-up Boeing 747 on them (nah
And remember the fuel processing plants in France (Cap La Haye) and the UK (Sellafield)? The Irish sea issue (one of the most contaminated seas anywhere) should be well known by now (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield).
2.b) Many land sites (not those that use rivers for coolant, but there you go
2.c) Security. I submit that land-sites are easier to guard than those that are not only accessible from the sea, but which could actually be towed away in a terrorist attack. If that happens what do you do? Sink it before it gets to waters you _really_ want to protect? Mount an attack by marines and risk having it blown up? Overpower the tugs that pull it, and risk having it blown up? Happy choosing admiral
Once again the "pragmatic" quick-fix, buy-now-pay-tomorrow artists seem to have pushed ahead with a scheme that jeopardises resources far beyond what they are be answerable and responsible for.
2.d) I can agree with the much reduced operational hazards of pebble bed reactors, but unless I'm much mistaken (correct me if I'm wrong please) these reactors are just slightly modified shipboard reactors of an aging Sovjet design. After all
How about towing a bunch of them up to Boston, New Orleans, LA, and San Francisco? Would solve your energy generation problems a treat! And real cheap too. Any takers?
"Run on Win ME" springs to mind, or maybe "Expensive Claptrap" perhaps.
Oh.. and by the way moving energy around is the single most energy extensive thing done in the US, accounting for over 1/2 of the energy generated. You'd be better off finding a way to generate the energy where you use it.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Only two things prevent a navy ship tied to a pier from powering the grid. Procedure and an automatic reverse power trip on the shore power supply breakers. Both are in place to protect the ships own electrical bus and generation equipment. The reactor is not normally running in port and the backup power to shore power consists of diesel engine(s) and the battery. These are very limited and designed only to supply enough to power the ships vital equipment.
A simple turn 1/4 turn of a single rheostat on the electical plant control panel is all it takes to change the ships load on shore power from positive to negative but the shore power reverse trips are on a delay to prevent tripping during transients.
I don't think the navy would exactly jump at the chance to power the grid with the nuclear plant running either though. Not having complete control of the load or being kept informed of expected load changes would probably freak people out. We've all heard of the network and system administrators from hell, through training and experience, many navy nuclear operators are the same.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
They could just rent a few of those vessels and get through those nasty brownouts they didn't have this year.
h tml
This is also not a big political issue as those barges could be pulled away to say Alaska or Mexico when election time comes. One could even put up a long cable and place the ship in international waters - electrical energy out of nowhere.
Oh, barge with something nuclear on it - this reminds me of something:
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Castle.
Castle Romeo is the first barge shot.
Enough rambling.
Je me souviens.
"What happens when there is a melt down?"
First off, assuming the reactor is actually capable of melting down (most modern designs aren't), the pile will melt through the bottom of the hull, fall down to the ocean floor, and then melt through that until it is spent. Uranium is quite a bit denser than water.
Secondly, it's already happened. Decades ago, the Soviets had a nuclear-powered icebreaker that had a meltdown, in the Bearing Sea, if I remember.
"You can't stop water from spreading to the rest of the world."
Yes, you can. I can't speak for the particular spot where this reactor will be placed, but there are large swaths of ocean where little or no mixing occurs, due to the influence of ocean and atmospheric currents. The Southern Ocean, for example, is pretty well cut-off from water in the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic oceans by circumpolar winds and currents.
As for vertical mixing (i. e. after the core has sunk to the bottom), this is even easier to accomplish. Except for near convection-causing volcanic vents, deeper water is cold and likes to stay down, and shallower water is warm and likes to stay up. Any sufficiently experienced submariner and many scuba divers can tell you about thermoclines.
> The more radioactive the waste,
> the faster it decays.
Well, yes, and into what?
The Chernobyl exclusion zone has now been extended because -- after these few years -- some of the the highly radioactive fallout that was relatively safe isotopes of highly radioactive elements -- for example alpha emitters -- have now decayed.
And changed thereby, some of them, into longer lived and yet more dangerous beta and gamma emitting isotopes.
Alphas are stopped by tissue paper, you know, even a lot of them don't do a lot of damage as long as you don't inhale and wash up well.
But the fission daughters of some of those alpha emitters, oh, my.
Like the instructor in Heinlein's Starship Troopers said to his class, "Society abides by the morals that it can afford".
That's from the book: that line didn't make it to the movie.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The article doesn't quite have it right.
There are at least fifty unclassified floating nuclear power stations around the world today. They're called Navy aircraft carriers.
Not to mention the hundered or so location-classified nuclear submarines floating about. Not Boomers, though those are generally nuclear powered as well. Nuclear spy subs, armed with simple chemical warheads.
(Note: I'm an ex Navy Nuclear Machinist Mate, and my statements are about as authoritative on this as you're going to get on Slashdot)
There have been no nuclear power accidents on navy vessels. None. And I would not be surprised if the powerstations are of a modified naval design. There are a number of ex navy engineers floating around and while they're not allowed to give away operational secrets (amount of fuel, specific design, etc) to civies, there's no regulation about designing a derivative plant, as long as the important things are changed.
Which, of course, you'd have to do to change from a nuke drive plant to a nuke amp-only plant. Different torque, heat, pressure requirements.
"When" there's a meltdown is a misnomer. Anymore, you don't get to put a nuclear design into production with any cutting of the corners (the number one cause of design failure is not building exactly to design). Modern fission plant designs are "Walk-away safe", meaning that the can run, unmanned, until their fuel runs out.
Additionally, if anything goes out of tolerance - the steam getting too hot, the coolant clogging, a sensor going out, anything - the mediator rods drop and the heavy water is flushed for normal water, then drained (effectively shutting the plant down until it can be "manually" restarted).
And don't count on some inscrupulous company deciding to surreptitiously cut corners and build under spec; the threat of meltdown on land is too great for any company to take. Threatening it on water is *far* worse, even with the salt in the water.
Which brings the question of your concern. A large volume of stagnant seawater (about 100 galons per gram of radioactive material for a full-on meltdown) is sufficient to break alpha and beta radiation down to non-dangerous levels in the space of a few years. For alpha, the salts capture the neutrons pretty readily becoming heavy but low-radiation isotopes, while the neutrons' kinetic energy is distributed by the movement of said salt ions (ie: the atoms don't shatter because of the weak lattices formed between salt ions and water ions). Something similar happens with beta radiation, but causing some greater problems; trace amounts of posionous chemicals are produced in the process. Since the actual mass involved is so big to so small, the ppm count is low, but it's still potentially problematic.
Meanwhile, in the ocean, you don't have stagnant water, you have moving water. Kinda like moving in a pool cools you off more quickly, the motion of the water helps to finish the fallout before it reaches your shores.
In short: I wouldn't worry about a well-off-shore plant melting down, and even if it did, the fallout would hardly be global. I would, however, want it a few miles away from *my* coast, just in case.
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Piling all of our waste together will not make it go away faster, this is wrong. Yes, if you accumulate more radioactive material, the total rate of decay will increase, because you have more material decaying... The probability of an individual radionuclide undergoing radioactive decay is independent of external influences save interaction with incident sub-atomic particles and the unique case of electron capture. If you took a piece of granite into a US nuclear facility, it would not be considered waste, much less radioactive waste. There are equipment and materials with radiation levels lower than your chunk of granite, however because these materials have DETECTABLE concentrations (> DAC/MDA) of program generated nuclides they will not be released to the public. It is the origin that is important. Case in Point: A worker at a hypothetical (ahem) nuclear facility receives radiopharmaceutical treatment without informing his superiors. He uses the restroom, somehow spreading urine all around the toilet. Later, another work treads the radioactive urine into a radiologically controlled area where the radio-urine is detected on his boots upon egress. The contamination is traced back to the restroom and the contaminant is identified as a radiopharmaceutical by isotopic analysis. The urine is cleaned up without radiological controls due to the origin of the radionuclide.
Although I would be one of the first in line to adopt solar, hydro or hydrogen energy approaches, none are feasible on a global scale.
What is your basis to say that ? Do you really think our sun don't give us enough energy ? Or that we can't save some ? Most of the sun energy goes into oceans and winds. And there are new technologies to harvest this abundant energy: ocean-based windmills (Danemark), tides and waves power plants, high energy algaes harvesting, etc.
Modern fission plants are walk-away safe? Certain correct operator actions are always assumed to occur, if only in limited scenarios. Not to say the plants aren't safe. They are. But I wouldn't go so far as to say they are walk-away safe.
Also, I think you carry your assumption about vendors doing shady things a bit too far. I think you'd be surprised what a vendor will do to save a buck.
In addition, your description of the protection system is a bit simplistic. Has it occurred to you that a protection system that acted when any little thing went wrong would be more dangerous than no protection system at all? Shutting down and starting up all of the time is more risky than operating at steady-state, and forcing an operator into a recovery scenario for what might be a red herring is not a safe thing to do. Protection systems care about both alpha and beta error.
Your statement would seem to imply that nuclear technology has advanced so far that there are no longer any issues with this power source. AFAIK there is still a problem concerning high level radioactive waste (spent fuel, core, primary cooling system), since some of it has a half-life of 20,000 years.
Radioactive half-life does NOT mean that in 20,000 years the radiation will automagically disappear -- it only means that just half of the radioactivity will be gone in that time. It might take 10 iterations of 20,000 years for the radiation of some items (like spent nuclear fuel) to decay to the point of relative safety.
No known government or corporation has every existed for 2,000 years, let alone 20,000 or 200,00 years. The only institution that I know of that has lasted that long is the Roman (christian) Church. I have yet to see any politician, Dept of Energy bureaucrat, or nuclear industy spokesperson publically suggest the formation of a "nuclear priesthood" to keep watch over, monitor and maintain radioactive waste casks for the next 100,000 years. Nor, for that matter, have I seen any of these same people incorporate 100,000 years worth of labor, materials, or liability in their claims of "cheap nuclear power". The closest was an early Dept of Energy claim that nuclear power plants would produce electricity that would be "too cheap to meter" (, and this propaganda was found to be completely false.)