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Small Nuclear Power Plants To Dot the Arctic Circle
Vincent West writes with news of a Russian project currently underway to populate the Arctic Circle with 70-megawatt, floating nuclear power plants. Russia has been planning these nuclear plants for quite some time, with construction beginning on the prototype in 2007. It's due to be finished next year, and an agreement was reached in February to build four more. According to the Guardian:
"The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia's biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years."
The west needs some all nuclear ships to ply the route between America and EU (no real chance of pirates) and perhaps across the pacific. This would drop CO2 emissions a great deal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
MOD UP. 70MW is mush LESS than submarines than the Russians have been using for years. For example, the Russian Typhoon class submarine has DUAL 90MW reactors in it. This is nothing new for Russia at all.
oh wait what?
The power plant produces 70MW.
Assume that the equivalent of this energy is dissipated as heat.
Sunlight on the Earth surface is on average 164W/m^2, though at polar circle this drops to 80-100W/m^2. Snow at best reflects 90%, absorbing 10%.
70,000,000/(80*0.1)=8,750,000m^2=8.75km^2
So one power plant is an equivalent of sunlight collected over 8.76km^2 area. Arctic ocean is 14,056,000km^2. Power plant increases the amount of heat absorbed in the area by .00006%
Alternatively the same amount of power would have to be produced by the same Gazprom using -- guess what? -- things that Gazprom happens to produce, namely fuel.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Oh really?
Yes, really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Zemlya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Peninsula
HTH,
HAND
I'm not surprised that nobody uses nuclear for cargo ships. You need to spend a lot more money on your shipboard engineering crew (more people, higher salaries, more training), you need to build and maintain shore facilities to handle nuclear plant maintenance, and nowadays you'd need a respectably-sized security force on board and at the shore facility to make sure you didn't lose control of your nuclear materials to people that want to do something other than push cargo with it.
The US Navy decided to stop using nuclear power on cruisers because it was cheaper to use conventional power for some of the reasons above. Note that the power requirements for a cruiser and a large container ship are about the same.
The ongoing negative public sentiment towards nuclear is probably another big deciding factor.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Oh really? Who told you that?
The only serious nuclear incident in USSR history, Chernobyl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_Disaster
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
1) The main reason for the Chernobyl disaster was a bad reactor plant design. A SCRAM should never ever bring the reactor to explosion. After the disaster, the control rods were heavily modified. Also, the control team never did anything against the reactor user manual.
2) This problem with the design was known a couple of years before the Chernobyl accident. Both the reactors of Leningrad nuclear power plant and of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, reactors of the same type, had serious accidents of the same type (SCRAM caused a nearly runaway reaction). At this point the problem became known, the designers were informed of it and even got some recommendations how to redesign the control rods to avoid this kind of problems in the future. The designers decided that since they were very important, well-known and highly-decorated scientists, they don't have to listen to "common people". The result is known.
3) There were some other nuclear accidents in the USSR. The most prominent is Mayak.
Nonetheless USSR was one of the nuclear reactor pioneers. The first commercial nuclear power plant was a soviet one. And there were some decent reactors like the current VVER line.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
As you suggest, there are now a number meltdown-proof reactor designs. These are not merely engineered with "infallible" safety mechanisms, but are fundamentally meltdown-proof by their very design. As long as the laws of physics hold, which is a reasonably safe assumption, there is no risk of meltdown.
While the Pebble bed reactor is safe though, the nature of the pebbles make for very difficult reprocessing, and otherwise still pose a long term waste management problem.
Nuclear is the clear winner for clean, environmentally friendly energy production, but I would recommend pointing people to the Integral Fast Reactor instead. An added benefit would be that such a design could also solve our current nuclear waste problems, by recycling it for use in such reactors. The true waste after recycling is both very minimal and very short lived by comparison.