Russia Launches Floating Nuclear Power Plant That's Headed To the Arctic (npr.org)

Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom launched a massive floating nuclear power plant over the weekend. It's the first nuclear power plant of its kind and it's headed to an Arctic port, reports NPR. From the report: Called the Akademik Lomonosov, the floating power plant is being towed at a creeping pace out of St. Petersburg, where it was built over the last nine years. It will eventually be brought northward, to Murmansk -- where its two nuclear reactors will be loaded with nuclear fuel and started up this fall. From there, the power plant will be pulled to a mooring berth in the Arctic port of Pevek, in far northeast Russia. There, it will be wired into the infrastructure so it can replace an existing nuclear power installment on land. Russian officials say the mandate of the Akademik Lomonoso is to supply energy to remote industrial plants and port cities, and to offshore gas and oil platforms.

It will take more than a year for the power plant to reach its new home port. The original plan had called for fueling the floating plant before it began that journey, at the shipyard in central St. Petersburg -- but that was scuttled last summer, after concerns were raised both in Russia and in countries along the power plant's route through the Baltic Sea and north to the Arctic. "The nuclear power plant has two KLT-40S reactor units that can generate up to 70 MW of electric energy and 50 Gcal/hr of heat energy during its normal operation," Rosatom said. "This is enough to keep the activity of the town populated with 100,000 people."

Comments

Re:That's head to the Arctic

[nojayuk]

Russian nuclear icebreakers such as "Fifty Years of Victory" have been taking tourists to the North Pole during the Northern summer for over a decade now. They're only really needed for serious icebreaking during the winter around the northern coasts. They use the same KLT-35 reactors as the floating power barge mentioned in the article.

A major reason for this project is to supply electricity and heat to communities on the northern coasts supporting oil and gas exploration efforts in the Arctic. The Chinese are looking at similar floating nuclear power plants to provide electricity for the artificial islands they're constructing in the South China Sea as well as developing their own nuclear naval capabilities. They're not actually building anything yet though.

Re:Actually this is a pretty old idea.

[thegarbz]

The other key difference here is the use of waste heat for remote central heating. I'm not sure how they do it in North America but in Europe and Russia many places have dedicated district area central heating plants, either fueled by waste reprocessing, cogeneration on the back of power plants, or in some horrid cases, standalone. By combining it with the power plant you get massive increases in efficiency from the fuel source as you can repurpose waste heat that is too cool to generate power, and put it to use for heating systems.

Also information is all over the place. That Wikipedia article says the KLT-40S used in this installation needs 14% enriched uranium.
An article from Power Technology says it uses KLT-40C which combined generate 300MW of heat. https://www.power-technology.c...

Re:Sea

[ledow]

Which will be so diluted by the time they touch anything, you wouldn't be able to tell above background radiation.

Average depth of the ocean:
3,700m

Therefore 1 tonne of radioactive material, in 1 square kilometre of ocean gives you:

1000 kg in 3,700,000,000 m^3

= 1kg in 3,700,000 m^3

= 2.7 x 10^-7 kg/m^3

Which is much less than the amount of gold in the ocean (on the order of one gram of gold for every 100 million metric tons = 1 x 10^-8 kg/m^3). Or, indeed, uranium. In fact, we've looked seriously into extracting uranium FROM seawater. (I'm not suggesting that's sensible, or the same kind of uranium, etc.).

Now, there are density issues, sinking, etc. to take into account but pretty much it's safer to drop Chernobyl's core into the ocean by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE than to allow it to go nuclear on land.

Plus, if you do it early enough, you don't have to worry about it going critical at all because a billion tons of water absorbs a lot of radiation and waste heat and pretty much brings all such reactions to a grinding halt.

There's a reason that nuclear power is primarily used in power plants, and then in submarines. It's a pretty safe way to contain such things, much safer than in the air.

Re:US has them beat...

[Ol Olsoc]

I would guess that permanent nuclear flight leave you with issues related to internal part heat.

The Atomic airplane is a fascinating bit of early cold war history. They came fairly close to making it work. It was eventually scuttled because the open cycle design irradiated everything in it's path, the radiation inside the plane, while being attenuated by shadow shielding, caused them to consider using older crew who would be expected to die of other causes before radiation caused leukemia took them out, and of course what would happen in the event of a crash. Even landing presented problems, as landing weight would be the same as takeoff weight.

Fortunately saner minds and ICBM's made the A-Plane unnecessary.

Then if you really want to freak out, research SLAM. A reactor powered cruise missile running open cycle at treetop level. You can guess the side effects of that.

The technogeek in me finds this stuff fascinating. The practical me asks "What the fuck were they thinking?"