Russia's Floating Nuclear Plants Under Fire From Greens

slashdotmsiriv writes with a link to an International Business Times article about Russia's plan to build floating nuclear power plants (a subject we discussed some time ago). The project is getting a lot of flack over possible safety problems from green groups. "The first floating power plant will be named 'Academician Lomonosov.' Mikhail Lomonosov was an 18th- century Russian scientist who achieved worldwide acclaim for his work in chemistry and physics and was founder of Moscow's state university. Customers could include Russian state-controlled gas giant Gazprom, the northern region of Chukotka and countries from Namibia to Indonesia, according to industry sources."

Comments

Re:What about nuclear submarines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sub reactors are tiny. And they ARE up in arms against them.

Re:I'm a convert

[Dr. Eggman]

Wide spread contamination at Three Mile Island? You must be joking. The only thing deemed no longer fit for human habitation was TMI station 2. The location was secured, no contamination outside the station; hell, they still use TMI-1! Chernobyl was a disaster, no doubt about it. But you would be out of your mind to compare that generation of Russian garbage against the up and coming Gen IV. The Gen. IV series will be designed for more than just maximum reprocessing: they will be the safer than any before and will even produce hydrogen onsite from the output steam (solving one of the big problems that prevents hydrogen from being a clean fuel.) Now, if you want to talk contamination consider this: the average 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant dumps about 5.2 tons of uranium and 12.8 tons of thorium, trapped in the coal it burns, per year! Nuclear power is a high risk, but low probability venture; your alternatives (outside hydro, solar, and geo) are going to be near polar opposites: high continual yield, low risk (of a major, concentrated incident.) I'll choose nuclear over coal, oil, or natural gas anyday (I live down wind and in "range" of one, no less.) Hydro, geo, and solar are all nice, but when you need unmatched yield; it's nuclear all the way. 80% of France's energy comes from nuclear power. Have you ever heard of the French Chernobyl? Of course not, that's because there neve has been one. Nuclear power is safe, effective, and will be the power of the future.

Re:Surprising?

[ArcherB]

Google "environmentalist agenda" or "environmentalist quotes".

Or, regardless of what you may think of the source, the data is accurate. The last quote is the most OT here.

A few examples:

Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process.... Capitalism is destroying the earth.

--Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists

We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects.... We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.

--David Foreman, Earth First!

Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.

--Pentti Linkola

If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.

--Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth-Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22

My sig is also an environmentalist quote!

Why shoot it into the sun?

[Firethorn]

We shouldn't be shooting the waste into the sun. We should be using it in breeder/IFR reactors for even more power. As for the low level stuff, grind it up and mix it with earth to seal old mines.