Chernobyl or the future of power?
But environmental groups have other names for the barge: “Nuclear Titanic” is one. Another is “Floating Chernobyl”.
Critics say that pretty much the worst thing you can do to a nuclear reactor is expose it to the high waves and fierce winds of the Arctic Ocean.
Jan Haverkamp, a nuclear expert for Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, called it a “shockingly obvious threat to a fragile environment”.
The world will see who is right sometime next year.
“Lomonosov”, named after an 18thcentury Russian scientist and poet, was towed out of the St Petersburg shipyard at the weekend for its meandering, year-long journey.
For a time, the vessel made a sizeable chunk of St Petersburg nervous. The barge was supposed to be equipped with nuclear fuel at the city’s shipyard, Rosatom said, but city leaders thought better of fuelling a first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor in the middle of a city of nearly 5.3 million people.
And Russia’s Baltic Sea neighbours worried about what would happen if a nuclear reactor en route encountered bad weather or technical issues too close to their fjords.
So the ship — sans nuclear fuel — will be pulled through the Baltic Sea, around the northern tip of Norway to Murmansk, a Russian city of more than 300,000 residents, where it will be fuelled.
It will ultimately be anchored at the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Arctic, northwest of Russia, and moored off the coast of Pevek, where it will replace an ageing reactor.
By 2019, the first-of-its-kind rig will provide power for the port town and for oil rigs.
For Rosatom, it is buoyant proof of concept that a floating sea-based reactor can work.
But Greenpeace says Rosatom’s latest venture, the floating nuclear barge, is dicey.
For land-based nuclear power plants, “there are thousands and thousand of measures that have been taken in order to prevent things from going really wrong,” he said. “If you look at the possibilities of a barge . . . the possibilities are a lot more limited.”