Photograph from Baltisky Shipyard via Reuters
... Russian state-controlled energy company Rosatom is moving ahead with plans to build the Akademik Lomonosov, a ship that would contain a pair of small nuclear reactors capable of generating up to 70 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to provide a city of 200,000 people with electricity as well as heat and desalinated water for drinking. Rt.com, an English-language Russian news website, has reported that the Russian company envisions the craft, which is scheduled for completion in late 2016, as the harbinger of a new breed of small, portable, ship-based power plants that it might manufacture and export to other countries.
But it is clear that a major impetus behind the effort to develop modular, portable, nuclear power at sea is Russia's own drive for oil and gas exploration in remote reaches of the Arctic.
Melting sea ice has opened the prospect of greater access to the Arctic's riches, including 30 percent of the world's undiscovered natural gas, according to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate. Sixty percent of that fuel is in the Russian Arctic, home to four of the ten largest natural gas fields in the world.
But one of the great ironies of the industry is that it will take energy to extract that energy.
The challenge of powering an energy-extraction infrastructure in Russia's Far East is great enough that momentum continues to propel the floating nuclear effort forward, despite a boatload of financing problems and delays.
... Russia's new floating nuclear power plant, the Akademik Lomonosov, is to have ten times the capacity of the 10-megawatt reactor that was aboard the old Sturgis. It will contain a pair of KLT-40 reactors—the same type used in the Russian Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreaker ships, which are roughly the same size. (Russia's much-vaunted fleet of 37 icebreaking ships include four that are nuclear-powered, with three more planned by 2017.) At a displacement of 21,500 tons, the Akademik Lomonosov would be far more humble in scale than the massive floating power plants once envisioned by U.S. utility companies. And according to the website of Rosatom's subsidiary OKBM, the ship would be towed to its destination, rather than sailing under its own power.
Instead of using highly enriched uranium like the Russian icebreakers' reactors, the Akademic Lomonosov's units will be modified to run on lightly enriched uranium, to conform to International Atomic Energy Commission rules aimed at preventing fuel from being stolen and diverted for use in nuclear weapons. The company catalogued a number of other safety features in a presentation to the IAEA this summer. It said the Akademic Lomonosov is designed to withstand a range of different catastrophic events, ranging from an earthquake with a magnitude of 10 and a tsunami large and powerful enough to cast the floating power craft ashore. It even could withstand having a 10-ton aircraft crash into it, according to the presentation.
In addition to its system of passive circulating coolant and control rods, in the event of an emergency, operators could deploy additional backup active and passive cooling devices and another system designed to reduce pressure building up inside the containment.
A corporate website touts the power plant's nuclear technology as proven to be resilient in a disaster, by citing a macabre example: the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, which sank in shallow waters in the Barents Sea in August 2000, apparently after one of its torpedoes exploded, killing its entire 118-man crew. "Even the long stay [of the] wrecked ship under water did not lead to the exit of radioactivity in the environment," the OKBM website proclaims.
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