A $200-Million Floating Nuclear Plant?

Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'A Floating Chernobyl?,' Popular Science reports that two Russian companies plan to build the world's first floating nuclear power plant to deliver cheap electricity to northern territories. The construction should start next year for a deployment in 2010. The huge barge will be home for two 60-megawatt nuclear reactors which will work until 2050... if everything works fine. It looks like a frightening idea, don't you think? But read more for additional details and pictures of this floating nuclear power plant."

Comments

Safety

[LiquidCoooled]

Where else could you get an unlimited supply of coolant?

Hell, if this goes pear shaped, you could drop the core miles beneath the sea never to be seen again.

Re:Safety

[kextyn]

I just want to point out a few facts here. Nimitz class carrier has 2 A4W reactors outputting 94 MW each. These carriers also have a crew of 3,200 ship's company and 2,480 in the air wing. This new facility will be powered by 2 KLT-40S reactors outputting 60 MW each. So yes, this may be a different scale of power generation. But it's a smaller scale then what the US Navy has floating already.

Re:Safety

[frdmfghtr]

Umm... this is a slightly different scale of power generation. Those ships and submarines which are nuclear powered have really small reactors. The power (and more importantly pressure) generated in a small Navy sub reactor is "small" compared to this beast. We're talking about TWO full scale reactors on a barge.

Yes, this is a change in scale, but in the other direction...Naval reactor plants are BIGGER than these two plants, power-wise. The S6G plant in the Los Angeles-class subs alone is more powerful than these two plants. While I've never worked on this particular plant, I don't doubt what wikipedia has to say about it.

S6G: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S6G_reactor

I DO have extensive experience operating older S5W reactor plants, and while I'm not about to give specs on it, I will say that it cranked out more power than one of these proposed floating plants.

As far as an aircraft carrier goes, the typical crew complement is 5000...and it can move in excess fo 30 knots. The electrical load ALONE is 32 MW, not to mention the power needed to drive 95,000 tons through the water at 30+ knots.

In short...these barges are small compared to Naval reactor plants.

Nuclear isn't necessarily scary

[selil]

Nuclear power isn't necessarily scarier than coal or oil fired furnaces doing the same thing. The critical issues of radioactivity have largely been fixed. Pebble Bed Reactors and other self monitoring technologies also don't produce waste product like other types of reactor.

Re:Nuclear isn't necessarily scary

[dasunt]

I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong) that the really nasty waste tends to be really nasty for short periods of time -- years or decades. Radioactivity is energy, and materials that are highly radioactive are releasing a lot of energy at a rate it cannot sustain for a long period of time.

The low-level radiation tends to last for a lot longer, since it releases less energy.

A candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

This is also why nuclear power plants have cooling pools for nuclear waste -- for the first few years, the waste produces enough heat (energy) and radioactivity to make moving and storing much more difficult.

*cues "the more you know" music*

Btw, many nuclear wastes tend to be heavy metals, and thus are prone to causing heavy metal poisoning. But this seems to be often (purposely?) overlooked, since opponents of nuclear power seem to focus on the much more "scary" radioactivy, and proponents don't want to mention more downsides of nuclear power.

Re:Nuclear isn't necessarily scary

[flyingfsck]

Yup, one can safely chew and swallow plutonium (some crazy scientist actually did that as a demonstration). The only damage will be to your teeth. It would be like chewing on a steel nail. With a half life of 25000 years, plutonium doesn't radiate, so the main danger is that it is a little poisonous, but to do anything, it needs to dissolve and being a solid metal, that doesn't happen easily, so if you swallow a plutonium pellet, it will pass through your body quite harmlessly. Compared to that, the liquid mercury is much worse and we eat mercury all the time in the form of salmon, tuna and dental fillings... It is the schtuff with short half lives that are problematic and since they decay rapidly, they become less problematic rather quickly - a self correcting problem. The real danger of a nuclear power plant lies in the Chernobyl type of fire, where the whole place goes up in smoke, creating a huge mess. This risk is reduced by building the reactors differently. Chernobyl was a carbon mederated reactor, so the obvious solution is to eliminate the carbon from the reactor design and modern reactors don't use carbon, for this very reason.

Re:Nuclear isn't necessarily scary

[phayes]

Oh, Bull. The largest proposed windmill project in the eastern USA was the windfarm that was proposed for Cape Cod Bay. Is was killed by opposition from the senior DEMOCRATIC senator from Massachusets: Ted Kennedy.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04 /27/kennedy_faces_fight_on_cape_wind/

It could be worse

[solevita]

Nuclear disasters on ships waiting to happen are nothing new in that area of the world. Russia still maintains a policy of keeping nuclear waste onboard container ships in the Arctic Sea:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5391586.stm

Hardly the first floating Nuclear Power Plant

[balsy2001]

The US and Russian Navies have been doing this for 50 years! This is the first commercial venture to do it, but the military has done it safely and effectively. The US Navy has over 5500 reactor years of operations without a nulcear accident. Also, this is not the first time that power from these reactors has been put into the power grid. Any US Navy vessel that is in port and connected to shore power (which they almost always do in port) can and have provided electricity to the grid if needed. This was done in charleston after a huricane.

Re:USS Enterprise, Nimitz, etc

[LWATCDR]

Actually you are incorrect.
The Enterprise actually has 8 reactors! The Enterprise was so expensive that the next class of carriers where not The Kitty Hawk class had four ships in it. Two of them are still in service.
What everyone is forgetting is the US did build a floating reactor into an old Liberty ship. In the late sixties it was used in Panama.

Re:USS Enterprise, Nimitz, etc

[Libertarian001]

The Big-E (my boat) has 8 reactors. That's not because they thought it was a good idea, but because it was a test-bed. Their are several different reactor and steam plants (GE and Westinghouse, different versions of each) on that ship. Those 8 reactors are comparable in output to the 2 used on all the Nimitz class CVNs.

To my knowledge, all US CVNs other than the Enterprise have just 2 reactors. IIRC, subs have just the one (but I wasn't a bubblehead, so don't quote me).

Re:Nuclear Is Quite Scary

[Terrigena]

Anything nuclear will create waste, you are mistake. Pebble Bed reactors are designed to prevent catastrophic reactions, but these are still possible. A containment leak would allow the atmosphere within the reactor to reach temperatures high enough to melt the graphite moderating cuticle. Pebble bed reactors are not realistic in an age of terrorism, they produce more waste and the mechanised fuel handling is more likely to result in disaster (see Hamm-Uentrop, West Germany). Never mind the logistics of TRACKING each and every pebble from its birth to final resting place in yucca mountain (which is near a fault line). The problem of nuclear energy and its waste has not been solved. As long as waste remains on the planet, it is a threat. I have absolutely NO IDEA how anyone could claim that the problem of nuclear waste is no longer a problem. I think the only explanation is the radiation from too much time spent within the leaky storage facilities at hanford or eating potatoes growing near Chernobyl has gotten to you. Look no further than the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington (US). Our Federal government has done a good job of keeping this disaster under wraps for the most part. This is because the administration would like you to believe nuclear energy is safe, so that they can gain public support for the reintroduction of the technology to our energy production matrix.

Umm....

[kf6auf]

The USS Enterprise has 8 A2W reactors (210 MW) and Nimitz class aircraft carriers have 2 A4W reactors (194MW). So yeah, 2x60W reactors can power much less than a nuclear aircraft carrier.

Re:Umm....

[some_hoser]

When comparing reactor powers, you really need to make sure you know what convention they are using when they say power - thermal power, or electric power? The thermal power of a plant is usually about 3x the electric. A 1000 MW (electric) plant runs at about 3000 MW (thermal). In the field they'll say MWe or MWt. A 60MWe reactor will be about the same as a 180MWt reactor. Another point is that on the nuclear powered ships, so cut down on space they have to use small (in terms of volume) reactors, and they use fairly highly enriched uranium (up to 90%), so the pressure inside gets much higher, and so they are more dangerous that conventional reactors. On a large barge, however, they have less space constraints so could go for a less energy dense and safer reactor.

Re:Umm....

[confused one]

for what it's worth, the Enterprise was overhauled a few years back... and they replaced the 8 smaller reactors with 2 larger reactors, to bring it up to the same equipment standard as the Nimitz class. (I know this because I live within a few miles of Newport News Shipyard, where they did the work).

Re:Umm....

[confused one]

oops, apparently I was wrong... this may have been planned at one point but didnt' happen. So much for local knowledge...

Re:Land-based power supply troubles?

[TooMuchToDo]

You are indeed correct Sir. This is called a SCRAM. In the event of a catastrophic failure, electric motors release rods into the reactor to completely shutdown the fission reaction. In the US, I believe this is mandatory to have a commercial reactor in production.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRAM

"In modern nuclear power plants, the control rods are lifted by electric motors against both their own weight and a powerful spring. A SCRAM rapidly (less than four seconds, by test) releases the control rods from those motors and allows their weight and the spring to drive them into the reactor core, thus halting the nuclear reaction as rapidly as possible."

Also, most people are ill-informed as to why Chernobyl occured:

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient

"A positive void coefficient means that the thermal power output increases as the void content inside the reactor increases due to increased boiling or loss of liquid moderator or coolant. If the void coefficient is large enough and control systems do not respond quickly enough, this can form a positive feedback loop which can quickly boil all the coolant in the reactor. This happened in the Chernobyl accident."

It's illegal to build positive void coefficient reactors in the US for this reason. Negative coefficient reactors won't have runaway reactions.

Small reactors

[AJWM]

We're talking about TWO full scale reactors on a barge.

No, we're talking two relatively small reactors on a barge. Typical nuclear power reactors for feeding the electrical grid are in the 600 to 1000 megawatt range, not 60 MW, and most facilities have more than one (the Pickering and Darlington facilities near Toronto have 8 650 MW and 4 850 MW reactors respectively).

The reactors aboard an aircraft carrier do more than just run the lights, they can push the whole thing at speeds in excess of 40 knots (how much in excess isn't exactly talked about -- but even that is more than fast enough to water ski behind!). Ditto for nuclear subs -- plus they provide air and water for the crew (hydrolysis and reverse osmosis).

Modern nuclear submarines typically use reactors up to 200 MW, the French Rubis-class subs use a 48 MW reactor, Russia's Oskar-II class uses 2 190 MW reactors. Surface ships like aircraft carriers or the Kirov-class battle cruiser use two reactors each up to 300 MW each.

The first floating reactor - USS Sturgis

[SoLoman33333]

The USS Sturgis, stationed at the Panama Canal. The Department of Energy describes the Sturgis as follows: STURGIS Floating Nuclear Power Plant; Designation MH-1A, Location: Gatun Lake, Canal Zone; Principal nuclear contractor: Martin; Pressurized water reactor, Capacity: 10,000 net kW(e), Authorized 45,000 kW(t), Initial criticality, 1967; Shutdown (permanently), 1976. The vessel provided power to the Canal Zone. It was the first floating nuclear power plant and, for nearly three decades, appeared to be the last. In 2008, the Russians plan to bring on line the next floating nuclear power plant.