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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.
Now electricity is being offshored. When's it going to end?
they bought the fuel rods on ebay.ru!
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
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 about the Sturgis, a "440-foot-long World War II Liberty ship that the Army converted into a floating 45-megawatt nuclear power plant."
More about Unique Reactors
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.
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)
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.
From: http://www.nuclear.com/n-plants/index-Floating_N-p lants.html :
* A floating nuclear power plant design, under development by OKBM in Russia, uses the KLT-40s reactor system, and involves a "special-purpose non-self-propelled ship" (a barge) intended for operation in a protected water area. There are plans to build a nuclear heat and power generating plant with a floating power-generating unit in the area of Pevek, Chukot Peninsula, in northeastern Siberia, and in Severodvinsk (Archangelsk region). The technical and economic characteristics of this power plant are:
* Electric power - 60 MW
* Heat output - 50 Gcal/h
* Number of reactor systems and main turbogenerators - 2
* Overall plant lifetime - 40 years
These power plants are multipurpose in terms of possible applications, since they provide electric power generation while also providing heat supply for various purposes, including seawater desalination.
[Source: Georgy M. Antonovsky (Chief Specialist, OKBM-the Experimental and Design Bureau of Mechanical Engineering, in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) et al., Table IV - "Technical and economic characteristics of a floating nuclear power station with the KLT-40s", in "PWR-type reactors developed by OKBM", Nuclear News, March 2002, p. 33]
* The KLT-40s is based on the KLT-40, which the US DOE has called a proven, commercially available, small PWR system because its design is based entirely on the nuclear steam supply system used in Russian icebreakers. The KLT-40 is a portable, floating, nuclear power plant intended mainly for electric power generation, but it also possesses the capability for desalination or heat production. The reactor core is cooled by forced circulation of pressurized water during normal operation, but in all emergency modes, the design relies mainly on natural convection in the primary and secondary coolant loops.
The KLT-40 is mounted on a barge, complete with the nuclear reactor, steam turbines, and other support facilities. It is designed to be transported to a remote location and connected to the energy distribution system in a manner similar to the Mobile High Power nuclear power plant operated by the U.S. Army in the 1970s. The designer and supplier of the KLT-40 is the Russian Special Design Bureau for Mechanical Engineering (OKBM).
Fuel for the KLT-40 is a uranium-aluminum metal alloy clad with a zirconium alloy. 200 kg of U-235 gives a core power density of 155 kW per liter on average (that's relatively high for a reactor, according to the DOE report), and the fuel may be high-enriched uranium (U-235 content at or above 20 percent). The fuel assembly structure and manufacturing technology are proven, and its reliability has been verified by the long-term operation of similar cores.
The KLT-40's primary system involves four coolant pumps feeding four steam generators. The secondary system uses two turbogenerators with condensate pumps, main and standby feed pumps, and two steam condensers. As much as 35 MWt energy can be transferred from the condensers to a desalination plant via an intermediate circuit.
The KLT-40 includes a steel containment vessel designed to withstand overpressure conditions. A passive-pressure suppression system condenses steam that might escape into the containment building.
The KLT-40 has a variety of "inherent safety characteristics". One involves the prodigious use of "burnable poison" in the fuel such that cold shutdowns are assured (because any increase in core temperature results in a lowering of core power -- it's what's called having a large negative temperature coefficient for the reactor core).
The KLT-40 is designed using a plug-and-play philosophy. It gets built at the factory and is able to be transported over water to remote locations. Although the KLT-40 requires refueling every two to three years, the transportability of the entire plant to maintenance centers provides enhanced pro
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I remember during the "energy crisis" of the early seventies, one of our colleagues at a Navy laboratory that happened to be near a submarine base suggested that we tap into the multi-megawatt output of docked nuclear subs to supply some of our lab's power. Needless to say, the "no nukes" eco-freaks that worked at the lab came unglued. I never knew if he was serious or just trying to get a rise out of people. If the latter, it certainly worked.
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.
--
make install -not war
Never? The more radioactive the waste, the faster it decays. Did you know that US standards say that if a piece of Granite were taken into a nuclear facility, it would be considered waste? Why? It's too radioactive. Yes, the stuff people make kitchen counters out of. This isn't to say you can bury the stuff for 20 years and it will be significantly less hazardous, but it can at least be contained, unlike the output from a coal fired power plant.
Final point, NEVER, EVER use absolute statements to make a point as exceptions will always bite you in the ass.
Wow who would have thought it:
"If necessary, the plant will also be able to supply heat and desalinate seawater."
Presumably supplying heat by, er, going critical and blowing up, desalinating seawater by, er, vaporising it and turning it into an enormous cloud of steam?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
"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.
According to this site the reactor will cost between $100 to $120 million.
So I guess it is a misprint.
"Lead my skeptic sight."
Are you sure you want to worry specifically about radioactive waste? Radioactive waste does, at least, decay and become harmless, more rapidly early on than later (i.e. it becomes half as dangerous every half-life). Moreover it's very easy to detect from a distance (with a Geiger counter, for example). Furthermore it's dangerous only in fairly large amounts (milligrams to grams).
Now compare that to, say, chemical waste such as mercury or lead from disposed batteries, or polycyclic aromatics from the smokestacks of coal plants. Mercury and lead are dangerous in exceedingly small quantities (which is why leaded gasoline was banned -- even the tiny amount in the vapor of gasoline is dangerous). Polycyclic aromatics can cause cancer forever -- they never get less dangerous. And so on.
Put it simply: of all the waste control and disposal issues presented to us by technology, radioactive waste probably does not actually rank near the top. It may be prominent in public discussion primarily because of its unfamiliarity, and because we are fully committed already to the technology (e.g. electronics) that generates chemical waste, whereas we thought in the era of cheap oil that we could do without nuclear power.
As a very crude but hopefully useful analogy, imagine you had a lot of very heavily waterlogged and thus incombustible wood, a coal-fired heater, and a relatively small amount of coal. You use the heat from the coal to dry out the wood. You haven't violated the laws of thermodynamics, but you've got yourself a whole lot more useful fuel. And you can use the burning dried wood to dry some more wood, and so on.
Now, this isn't some kind of perpetual motion machine. Once you've burned the plutonium (the dried wood), you can't burn it again. But there is so much waterlogged wood (U-238) that we're not going to run out for a very, very, very long time.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)