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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."
Has ANYTHING Nuclear related not taken flak from green groups? I'm not surprised at all that they're objecting, I mean this is a perfectly clean form of electricity which wouldn't pollute anything and, in the event that it sank, would only deposit nuclear materials back where they came from, the Earth's Crust. Oh sorry, my anti-green group side is showing...
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Why aren't these groups up in arms about nuclear-powered subs that have navigated our oceans for quite some time? How is this really any different on a fundamental level?
--VladP
Just how many light years away is this gas giant, Gazprom?
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
If you think about it, one of the most significant difficulties with building nuclear power plants is the "not in my backyard" problem. This could move the problem onto the oceans, perhaps the safest place for it. (This doesn't address the "any nuke is a bad nuke" arguments, but those are likely to prove impractical in a power hungry world in the long run...)
Benefits:
1) No immediate population centers. This gives any fallout time to disperse in case of a major failure.
2) Portability. Aside from the commercial advantages (shift reactors to high demand areas, no building costs for new locations/shutdown and cleanup costs for areas suddenly with low demand, etc) things like this could be moved off the coasts of disaster regions to provide major power to devastated areas quickly.
3) If they build it to be submersible, they can simply ride out any storm below the wave level. This means a lot of the extreme construction required for fixed-target plant defenses (storm and hostile) becomes less critical.
Risks:
1) Reliability engineering may prove a challenge for large scale plants. This is unknown at present, and I didn't see enough information handy as to studies done on the designs. You need to simulate the heck out of these things, and design failsafe (I wonder if it could be made provably failsafe...)
2) If a large amount of radioactive material gets dumped accidentally into a major ocean current (I should think this an unlikely failure mode with correct designs, but just suppose...), I'm not sure about the effects - better or worse than venting into the atmosphere? Will it simply sink and stay in one area, eventually recoverable?
Using truly modern designs, I am willing to believe the risk of major disaster can be made very small. (It seems like the human element was the least accounted for in older designs, so including that in the designs this time around should help...) This is a very interesting idea, and I think it deserves a detailed study to ascertain its risks, benefits, and whether it is practical with current technology.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Well, yes. The greens will not accept being murdered by anything as environmentally unfriendly as Polonium-210, thank you very much.
I used to be solidly anti-nuclear, but after I educated myself and weighed the pro's and con's, I realized that it's the way to go. One plant, with it's few tonnes of radioactive waste that can be reprocessed several times and then securely stored away even though it's not an immediate mortal threat, can produce as much energy as many ugly, smelly, waste-by-the-megaton, coal plants.
Really, it is the appropriate mid-range solution. Hydro plants are very good (the one in Quebec is amazingly huge), but you're limited in where you can have them. I don't agree with man-made lakes feeding Dam hydro, and tidal/wind are a ways off yet... nuclear is the way to go to get rid of gas and coal plants, that are doing more to mess up our environment than one glowing bar lost in Homers shirt ever could.
And a floating plant? It's not like it's riding on an inner tube, where one errant bb pellet is going to take the whole thing down. It doesn't exactly fill me with joy to consider it, but at the same time, it does have aspects that make sense, and if it'll get some more strip mines closed, I'm all for it.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I'm not surprised they can find someone to object to this idea - if you go far enough out, you can probably find people who object to the human race on the grounds the Earth would be better off (for some definition of "better" that I don't really understand) without us. There are people to whom the word "nuclear" is associated with nothing but disaster/mass destruction. This is understandable, but other objections have been raised to almost every form of power imaginable. Minimizing unnecessary damage to our environment is good, and I applaud the efforts to push for this goal, but there are limits to how far this can be done without becoming unrealistic. For example:
1) Wind farms are decried for noise, wiping out birds, and ruining the view.
2) Solar power is objected to in terms of the materials/processes needed to make the cells and the ecological effects of shadowing large portions of the landscape.
Geothermal is probably the only case where I don't know of any major objections, but geothermal cannot power everything we do. The fundamental truth is that extraction of energy from the surrounding environment (or introduction of it from storage by increased thermal/other emissions due to combustion/nuclear processes) MUST have an impact on the system. We cannot live without having an impact on the world around us - it is simply not possible. The concern is to minimize the negative effects of our activities while still doing what we need to do. Solar and wind appear to be much less intrusive compared to most current large scale power generation methods, and as such seem like logical directions to pursue. Reducing power usage is good but in the end our population is likely to expand either in activities or numbers to consume all possible economic power that we can generate.
I'm wondering if the folks objecting to this one are objecting on the grounds of practicality, or simply on the grounds that it is nuclear, period. If the latter, I think they will eventually need to face up to the fact that fossil fuels won't last forever and we are not going to abandon large scale power usage. The problem is thus defined as how do we sustain that usage without undue risk, not how do we live on power levels low enough to be generated without significant impact of any kind. The later is simply unrealistic and not a useful basis for discussion.
Has ANYTHING Nuclear related not taken flak from green groups?
You've obviously never watched "Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster". Those Japanese hippies partying on the side of Mt. Fuji get damn near wiped out by Hedorah before Godzilla saves their grubby, unwashed, marijuana-reeking asses. By the end of the movie, they're so damn happy they've lived to smoke another joint that they'd probably OK the installation of a Chernobyl-style reactor right next to the free-love commune where they all live.
GMD
watch this
Right! And nuclear waste is NOT pollution!
I make a distinction between waste and pollution.
A barrel of waste in a containment facility isn't pollution. Mercury, in a container, is a valuable product for commercial use. Mercury that's escaped the smokestack of a coal power plant is pollution.
Basically, since we contain all the nuclear waste quite successfully(esp compared to coal power), it's not pollution.
Having seen the figures for realworld deaths caused by the pollution of coal power, combined with it's safety record and the figures screamed by the greens for worst-case nuclear disasters*, I'd rather go with the proven safety record of nuclear.
*That aren't even panned out for the worst nuclear power disaster in history, Chernobyl.
I don't read AC A human right
After spending nine years in the US Navy, five years on a US Warship (USS Reuben James), and one year on a USNS (John Lenthall), I can say that nearly 60% of all time on ships is spent doing MAINTENANCE.
US Warships will degrade into a complete rustbucket if you stop doing maintenance for even a single week. One of the biggest expense accounts on any ship is the paint locker and it's associated gear of chipping hammers, knuckle dusters, needle guns, grinders and deck crawlers. You chip paint and then re-paint every single day, non-stop, 365 days a year. And every three years, you pull into drydock to get scoured from stem to stern in a right proper job, inside and out.
And this is just the painting maintenance.
Add in broken electronics, broken pumps, broken valves, broken flanges, bent hinges, worn gaskets and the flood of everyday things that continuously need fixing, upgrading or maintaining, and you suddenly understand why so much of our ship's budget goes towards maintenance.
The ocean is a VERY harsh environment, and it breaks things. Easily.
Our military is able to keep things running smoothly because they have the following:
1. MONEY.
2. Highly trained people. (Yes, even the deck apes.)
3. Highly trained civilian contractors on shore that can be sent to a ship in less than 48 hours.
4. Rules and regulations carved in steel that must be followed or else officers get fired or sent to Leavenworth.
5. MONEY.
This is why we can have nuclear reactors on aircraft carriers without them going *BOOM*. Also, ours are very small, meant only to supply power for the ship and it's crew.
Now then...
The Russians have:
1. No money.
2. No more highly trained people. (They all left because they weren't getting paid.)
3. No civilian contractors that aren't part of the Russian Mafia in some way.
4. No rules that can't be bent with a few rubles.
5. No money.
So please...explain to me just how having the Russians putting nuclear reactors-meant to supply power to cities on the shore-on THEIR ships would be a good idea?
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