National Post (National Edition)
Russians develop floating nuclear power station
MURMANSK, RUSSIA • Along Kola Bay in the far northwest of Russia lie bases for the country’s nuclear submarines and icebreakers. Low, rocky hills descend to an industrial waterfront of docks, cranes and railway tracks.
Here, Russia is conducting an experiment with nuclear power, one that backers say is a leading-edge feat of engineering but critics call reckless.
The country is unveiling a floating nuclear power plant.
Tied to a wharf in Murmansk, the Akademik Lomonosov rocks gently in the waves. The buoyant facility, made of two miniature reactors of a type used previously in submarines, is for now the only one of its kind.
Moscow, while leading the trend, is far from alone in seeing potential in floating nuclear plants.
Two state-backed companies in China are building such facilities, and U.S. scientists have drawn up plans of their own. Proponents say they are cheaper, greener and, perhaps counterintuitively, safer.
“They are light-years ahead of us,” Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, said of the Russian floating power program.
Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear company, has exported nuclear technology for years, selling plants in China, India and a host of developing nations. But smaller reactors effectively placed on floats can be assembled more quickly, be put in a wider range of locations and respond more nimbly to fluctuating supply on power grids that increasingly rely on wind and solar.
The Russian submarinestyle reactors will generate a combined 70 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power about 70,000 typical North American homes.
Officials plan to tow the vessel to coastal cities in need of power, either for short-term boosts or longerterm additions to electricity supply. It can carry sufficient enriched uranium to power the two reactors for 12 years, before having to be towed, with its spent fuel, back to Russia, where the radioactive waste will be processed.
The Akademik Lomonosov will start out serving Pevek, a remote port in Siberia about 800 kilometres from Alaska, next year.
The Sudan Tribune has cited that country’s minister of water resources and electricity as saying the government in Khartoum has a deal to become the first foreign customer. A Sudanese government spokesman declined to comment on the report.