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

Surprising?

[Jarjarthejedi]

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...

Re:Surprising?

[ArcherB]

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...

I think you can broaden your question to be "Has ANYTHING Energy related not taken flak from green groups?"

Re:Surprising?

[ArcherB]

I think you can broaden your question to be "Has ANYTHING not taken flak from green groups?"

The Amish

Re:Surprising?

[Bluesman]

Those damn Amish, what with their imprisoning animals and eating animal products.

-Vegan environmentalist

Re:Surprising?

[TheRaven64]

You know, I'm still not convinced by the concept of 'nuclear waste.' The reason it's dangerous is that it's radioactive. If it's radioactive, that means it's a good energy source. A lot of so-called nuclear waste would work well as a power source for betavoltic generators or similar.

What about nuclear submarines?

[atomic777]

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?

Re:What about nuclear submarines?

[Timesprout]

Well fundamentally it's different because unlike the submarines the power plant cant launch missiles and torpedoes at you if you complain too much.

Re:What about nuclear submarines?

[Harmonious Botch]

I'll bet that this is surplus from one of their submarines.

Even with the cost of Russian labor, it would be tricky just to move and install this thing, complete with power cables, mooring lines, etc for 200K. It therefore follows that they already have the reactor. Where do Russians get surplus reactors? From subs that aren't seaworthy any more.

Protest Information

[Lord_Slepnir]

There will be a meeting for anyone interested in protesting held in the woods about 2 miles outside of town at about 11pm tonight. Bring a shovel.

--VladP

A bit outside their market..?

[Archwyrm]

Just how many light years away is this gas giant, Gazprom?

What are the risks vs. benefits?

[starseeker]

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.

Re:What are the risks vs. benefits?

[SixFactor]

To address your risk points:

1. Reliability. For any nuclear power plant of any design, the key to reliability is ensuring its structures, systems, and components (SSCs) are by themselves reliable (a chain only being as strong as its weakest link), and more importantly, qualified to meet rigorous standards during harsh (i.e., accident) operating conditions. In the U.S., the Maintenance Rule (10CFR 50.65) requires that reliability and unavailability records be always available for NRC audit. This is a big factor in why US plants have astronomical production records compared to even 10 years ago. Simply put, using proven components is a Good Thing(TM).

2. Radiation material release. Dilution is the solution to pollution. The risk of cancers (thyroid, bone) is already conservatively overestimated by using current methods, and conservative standards ensure these risks are further minimized. And let's be clear on this: any operating nuclear power plant periodically performs a controlled release of radioactive material into the environment during the course of its operation. These releases ensure that the activity levels are low, the wind is going in a proper direction, and that once diluted, are inconsequential with regard to risk. I'd like to say nuclear is pollution-free, but it I would be lying. But the nature and level of that pollution's release is tightly controlled so as to be safe.

You are absolutely correct about the effects of human intervention: if the machine was left alone, TMI-1's core collapse would not have occurred (operations belatedly closed off the source of the initial primary coolant loss - a stuck-open valve - but it also closed off the core's cooling path, which was through this valve); Chernobyl's catastrophic reactivity/steam explosion would not have occurred if operators did not conduct an ill-conceived experiment to maximize production.

Modern Western designs incorporate a great deal of lessons learned from the past. They incorporate a great deal of redundancy, or have features that allow an operator a great deal of time to take action, in case of an emergency.

One other thought: I'll call these "barge" nukes - are not a new concept. They were conceived in the 60's, and several US nukes in operation today were originally intended to be on barges, towed to a transmission site, and operated from there. Typically, these units had small containment volumes, which necessitated the invention of ice condenser systems to absorb the energy from a loss of coolant accident. The barge thing didn't fly, but these plants currently operate on land, but retain the ice condenser feature. Nice cold containments.

Re:20 journalists have died in Russia

[HerrEkberg]

Well, yes. The greens will not accept being murdered by anything as environmentally unfriendly as Polonium-210, thank you very much.

I'm a convert

[Cervantes]

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.

The "Green" Movement has good and bad points

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Waste != Pollution

[Firethorn]

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.

Re:Waste != Pollution

[AaronW]

The sad part is is that there are viable methods of recycling a lot of the nuclear waste, i.e. breeder reactors. I'd love to see the US push nuclear power and build breeder reactors to deal with the waste and create more fuel.

A breeder reactor can reuse almost all of the high-level nuclear waste. I hate to see them just bury some potentially useful fuel, especially when the future supply of fissionable material is limited.

Re:Waste != Pollution

[Firethorn]

1st: Something with a 10k half-life actually isn't that dangerous, especially if you spread it around(dilution), rather than trying to keep it concentrated. It even neglects that there's still 90-99% usable fuel in that 'waste', it just needs some reprocessing. Some of the newer designs are even capable of using it with minimal reprocessing.

Should the last 65 years* be considered statically significant on the performance for the next 100,000?
* By the way, it's not good:

Not good? Compared to what? Coal power?

Particulate emissions from power blamed for 30,000 deaths/year
Coal power blamed for 22,000 premature deaths, in the USA, per year

From your links:
2000-2006: 13 workers exposed to 'slight' or 'trace' levels of radiation, one plant had increased radioactive levels about 10% over ambient for "several days" in Hungary. This was considered a critical event. Overall level probably still less than ambient in Colorado Springs. Deaths: None.
1990's: Deaths: 2 Japanese workers at a uranium reprocessing facility who violated procedures. Will likely increase to 3 eventually. Exposed: 2k or so Russian workers exposed to up to 50mSv(half the allowed 5 year dosage). Happened at a plutonium reprocessing facility; most likely nuclear weapons related. Unknown number(but probably under ten) Georgian soldiers; from a military training source, not nuclear power.
1980s: Chernobyl, currently blamed for 93k possible future deaths by Greenpeace(hardly a dispartial source), current death toll by the other side is placed at just over a hundred. The models predicting thousands of deaths use the linear no-threshold model, which is in dispute. Studys on low level radiation exposure actually suggest a negative correlation with cancer(IE more radiation, up to a point, leads to less cancer). Besides Chernobyl, there was 1 other civilian fatality, and 13 Russian navy members died in two submarine accidents. There were four other exposure incidents; half military half civilian, two escaped containment.

I'm skipping earlier than the 1980s. Nuclear power in the '70s was just under development, it'd be like using the model-T to express car safety. The models are just that different.

Even if we take greenpeace's number, pad to to 100k for two decades, that's still 1/6th the death toll as experienced in the USA ALONE for coal power over the same time. And Chernobyl was a worse than worst case scenario; especially when compared to the safety of US plants.

Even Russian power plants are far safer today; Chernobyl was their wakeup, as TMI was ours.

I can think of a few good reasons?

[IonOtter]

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?