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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."
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."
It's head to the Arctic
The US had a nuclear power plant on a barge in the Panama Canal Zone in the 60s and 70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
US also had a few "portable" land-based reactors powering military bases and a station in Antarctica.
Not the first (the USS Sturgis, back in the mid 60s, was the first floating nuclear power plant), and it's actually pretty small at 70 MW (a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is about 3 times that power). But I guess "Russia Russia Russia!" demands media so we can keep the public thinking about Trump and Russia?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We are head to the Arctic.
I just saw this on the Google news feed: Russia just launched a floating nuclear power plant, headed to the Arctic.
I can't help but comment on this headline: Russia's 'Nuclear Titanic' Heads West, Raising Fears of 'Chernobyl on Ice' to say the "Chernobyl on Ice" sounds like the worst Ice Capades theme ever.
(Apologies to those that take the potential destruction of the environment and Earth seriously.)
I'll add that "Nuclear Titanic" sounds like a good name for a James Cameron movie or documentary.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I guess those don't count as floating nuke power plants. Because they're not powering cities or some such. Nimitz class aircraft carriers have 6000+ crew, more than many small towns.
Other than "kinda cool" blerb.
- They've already got nuke power up there.
- They have TONS of nuke subs
- They've got tons of military ships / weaponry up there so there's no chance this is some smuggling run.
Is it solely a story because "muh russia controls everything"?
With quality articles like this, how will we have time to discuss incredibly important topics like whetehr Hollywood and tech are "too pale"?
In 1961 US Army converted an old Liberty ship called the SS Charles H Cugle into a floating power plant back in 1961, pretty much with exactly the purpose: to provide a mobile electricity generation station for remote areas. The newly renamed MH-1A Sturgis was towed to the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1975, then mothballed.
The Russian project is much more powerful, employing a pair of nuclear icebreaker reactors to generate a total of 140 MW, 14x the power of the old Sturgis. to obtain this kind of power in a compact ship-borne package, the KLT-40 reactors use nearly more highly enriched uranium than is typical in land based reactors: 40% to 90% rather than 3%-5%.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I want a smaller one on wheels please!
1 MW or even 0.5 MW will be plenty for my use case. Since I live in Alaska, the steam output will come handy too.
Any ideas for this kind of market? What is the smallest nuclear electricity generator even built?
It would be cool to have one for camping trips.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
any nuclear powered navy ship is by definition a floating nuclear power plant. The Orion project was a flying nuclear power plant.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
might want to read that yourself, the company was for TNK-BP, not BP.
I know where you can get 1.21 gigawatts in wheels. It goes 88 MPH.
Eh? What are these people smoking, just use the damn watt for power output.
So when something unexpected happend, like a few years back in Japan, you don't have the waste slowly seeping through the ground possibliy a little bit leaking into the ocean, but when something bad happens, the all the radioactive stuff is immediately in the water and you have a global problem. Nothing to worry about. We've thought about everything.... Right!
Spent fuel can simple be dropped straight into the ocean....like on an old train toilet. Once done the entire reactor is sunk without any need of expensive cleanup.
It's just as well there are no ocean currents which could carry irradiated water away from the sunken reactor.
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.
And I'll form the head to the Arctic!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Time to poison an unknown distance of ocean capable of spreading radiated water through the out a large area.
Oh well, the survival of the species is overrated anyhow.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Wait, Russia has nuclear aircraft carriers?
Russia has air craft carriers? (plural?)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Which, pretty much, is an incredibly safe way to deal with it.
No, it is super dumb.
The waste is not going away but directly into the food chain ... no more fish for you. No more cattle fed with fish remains.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Great idea! I wish I had thought of it!
Why would you want the people who cooked themselves on the land to be doing it for everyone on the high seas?
ACTUALLY....
Not so stupid, compared to the damage done by having a radiological mess on land.
Where I'd prefer we NOT have the mess and not willy-nilly dump nuclear waste into the ocean, if the choice is having a partially melted down reactor blow apart and burring on land near a major city, or having the option of towing the mess away and scuttling it in the middle of the ocean, I know what I'd choose.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Nope, just Israel. Iran is not a real threat to anyone.
Who are you trying to kid? Iran IS a threat with both nukes (in progress), chemical weapons and missiles... Maybe not a direct threat to the USA... Yet... but certainly a threat to our allies. They are also a threat to the straights where most of the world's crude oil gets hauled though and they could shut down shipping though there.
Israel doesn't scare me, though I'm pretty sure they have nukes given to them by the USA... I suppose of you are intent on attacking Israel their nukes might be a threat to you, but they are not to me. Iran's development of nukes is a threat.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"can generate up to 70 MW of electric energy and 50 Gcal/hr of heat energy..."
That should be 70MW of electric POWER.
50Gcal/hr comes out to almost 58MW of heating power, which they have to remove from the boat lest the heat exchangers, and probably other components, overheat.
I guess they can just dump the heat into the water where they dock and introduce tropical fish there, and charge to snorkel with the fish. :-)
Everyone would chose that.
But it does not change the fact that it poisons the fish and ends up in the food chain.
So: you actually stop fishing there, and later determine where else to stop because of migration.
E.g. you would not want to eat salmon in paris that grew up in a nuclear trash pit north of Norway (yeah, bad example).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Like I said, I'd prefer to not dump stuff willy-nilly... But I can also see that nuclear waste, properly encased and sealed, could easily be dumped in places where the effect on fisheries and things on the food chain would be pretty much non-existent. This would be especially true for some deep convergence zones, where the radio active parts would decay before they reached any portion of the food chain. In fact, a number of nuclear reactors from sunken submarines are out there, with out much of an issue.
The only "trick" would be to encase the really bad stuff in coverings what would last long enough but some ceramics and glass materials seem promising to me... AND making sure the stuff is left alone. The real problem with high level stuff tossed into international waters is that any fool can go snatch it up and purposely spread it out on land, or sea in an effort to make a mess, but that's another issue all together.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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