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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."
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.
We are head to the Arctic.
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%.
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Yes, it's meaningful, because it means it'll be hooked up to the remote heating system for the small community, so serving a double utility role, and saves them from building a separate gas, coal or oil fired plant for that role.
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.
Yeah, it is amazing how poor some of the Slashdot headlines are now. They are full of grammatical mistakes, unnecessary contractions, inconsistent uppercasing, and often just misleading. This is probably what was meant:
"Russia Launches a Floating Nuclear Power Plant Headed for the Arctic"
This one from several hours ago:
"Comcast Won't Give New Speed Boost To Internet Users Who Don't Buy TV Service"
Uses two negative constructs. Would be far better as:
"Comcast gives new speed boost only to Internet users who also buy TV service"
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!
It's just as well there are no ocean currents which could carry irradiated water away from the sunken reactor.