On Friday, an unusual kind of vessel set sail from the Arctic city of Murmansk, Russia, for a destination in the country’s far east––a floating nuclear power plant equipped with two reactors.
The vessel, dubbed the Akademik Lomonosov, is set to travel about 2,900 miles to the Arctic port town of Pevek, which has a population of about 4,000 people, where it will be loaded with nuclear fuel and put in place to provide power to the region, according to Russia’s state nuclear corporation, ROSATOM.
Russia’s far east may just be the beginning. ROSATOM has said that it’s in talks with potential customers for the floating power unit, and sees “significant market potential” in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. The vessel’s reactors can generate 70 megawatts of electric energy and 50 gigacalories an hour of heat energy, according to ROSATOM––enough to support a city of up to 100,00 people.
Why are people worried about the floating nuclear power plant?
The Kursk nuclear submarine sank on the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, 2000, killing 118 people on board, and scientists have recent found that an nuclear sub that sank in the Barents Sea, the Komsomolets––which was lost in 1989––is emitting high levels of radiation.
Then there’s Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear power station meltdown in the former Soviet Union that is perhaps the biggest and most famous civil nuclear disaster in history. It exposed potentially hundreds of thousands of people to radiation.
nvironmental activist group Greenpeace has publicly raised concerns about the Russian nuclear power vessel. In an April blog post titled, “The next Chernobyl may happen in the Arctic,” Konstantin Fomin of Greenpeace called for the program to be brought to a halt.
“This is an example of how new technologies are put into use without reflection on their safety,” Fomin wrote, adding, “Greenpeace demands the abandonment of expensive and dangerous atomic energy.”…..
Robert Bean, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at Purdue University, tells TIME that there is a different set of concerns for nuclear reactors at sea than for reactors on land. Reactors at sea must be protected from storms, and have differing security concerns because they can be approached by other ships.
However, says Bean, the Russians are employing a type of reactor that has been used for a long time on its ice-breaking ships––the KLT-40S––and will be similar to the design of reactors the Russians use in submarines. Bean says that the design is very similar other reactors used around the world……
if there’s a reason to be concerned about the reactor, it’s because Russia hasn’t been open about its nuclear program and past accidents. …..https://time.com/5659769/russia-floating-nuclear-power/
