nuclear-news

Russia’s floating nuclear power plants pose catastrophic risk

“With a floating nuclear plant you have a mechanism to significantly increase the amount of radioactive material going into the environment,”

Floating Chernobyls OpEdNews: Karl Grossman 3 Sept 10 Russia has embarked on ascheme to build floating nuclear power plants to be moored off its coasts and sold to nations around the world.

“Absolutely safe,” Sergei Kiriyenko, director general of Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy corporation, told Reuters as the barge that is to serve as the base for the first floating plant was launched recently in St. Petersburg.

However, David Lochbaum, senior safety engineer at the Union of ConcernedScientists, describes an accident at a floating nuclear power plant as “worse” than at a land-based plant. “In a meltdown, a China syndrome accident, the molten mass of what had been the core would burrow into the ground and some of the radioactive material held there.

But with a floating nuclear plant, all the molten mass would drop into the water and there would be a steam explosion and the release of a tremendous amount of energy and radioactive material. It would be like a bomb going off,” says Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at Washington-based UCS.
“With a floating nuclear plant you have a mechanism to significantly increase the amount of radioactive material going into the environment,” says Lochbaum, for 18 years an engineer in the nuclear industry and an instructor for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A large plume of radioactive poisons would be formed and “many more people would be put in harm’s way.” Further, he notes, there would be radioactive pollution of the sea.Nuclear experts in Europe–including Russia–are as critical as is Lochbaum about floating nuclear power plants and their special accident potential. Other issues raised include the floating plants being sources of fuel for nuclear weapons and easy targets for terrorists.

OpEdNews – Article: Floating Chernobyls

September 3, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia, safety | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear spin, nuclear technology, radiation, reactors