Small Nuclear Power Plants To Dot the Arctic Circle 255
Vincent West writes with news of a Russian project currently underway to populate the Arctic Circle with 70-megawatt, floating nuclear power plants. Russia has been planning these nuclear plants for quite some time, with construction beginning on the prototype in 2007. It's due to be finished next year, and an agreement was reached in February to build four more. According to the Guardian:
"The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia's biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years."
Nuclear submarines (Score:5, Insightful)
This probably sounds like a serious potential problem to some of the nuclearphobes, but the basic description sounds like they're using nuclear submarine power plants with electrical generators attached to the turbines instead of a screw.
In other words, this sort of thing has been operating safely for about 50 years now.
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing new (Score:4, Insightful)
The Russians have been operating nuclear-powered icebreakers in that area for decades. This seems to be a similar design, just with a big generator attached.
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that the Russians have realized that oil is something you want to use where replacing it is hard, i.e. in vehicles, not where you can easily replace it with something else (i.e. large stationary installations).
Re:No maintenance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:3, Insightful)
By the US, sure. Decidedly not true of the Russians. If their accident rate has gone down in the last twenty odd years, it's because their operational rate is a small fraction of what it was before that.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I don't agree that cheap gas is good. Cheap gas = larger cars = more emissions. Also, cheaper gas = lower price point green alternatives have to compete with. You say "until alternative cars become affordable", but the cheaper gas is, the longer that takes.
Re:No maintenance? (Score:1, Insightful)
Perhaps it's to offload the sent nuclear fuel, to bring to a more populated section of the world?
But the concerns are unfounded. Only one Russian nuclear plant has leaked large amounts of radioactivity, and only one Russian sub has killed all the sailors aboard. (At least those are the only ones in the Western press.)
And these unmanned nukes can't be hijacked because they will have a big "Do not disturb" sign on them. (They will borrow the ones used by the ships off Somalia.)
Re:Nuclear Power (Score:4, Insightful)
whatcouldpossiblygowrong! (Score:2, Insightful)
IMHO, This is a terrible idea. Russia isn't exactly sitting at the top with regards to success rates with their nuclear power plants - whether they're ship-borne or land based. Russia has a whole shipyard full of nuclear relics from the cold war that are simply rusting away in a harbor. Some of these ships still highly radioactive. Dangerously so! Not very eco-friendly, is it? Dare I even mention Chernobyl?
Aren't we losing the arctic and antarctic ice sheets due to global warming? Now we want to cool nuclear power plants with frigid arctic water? Let me phrase that another way. Now we want to warm the arctic waters with the nuclear power plant cooling towers?
Let's not forget the fragility of the ecosystem there, either. I can practically guaranty when it comes time to dispose of nuclear cores they'll take shortcuts - as Russians always do - and some of these cores are going to wind up at the bottom of the ocean. It's not a questions of 'if', but 'when.'
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:U.S. Army shipboard nuclear reactor (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow... that's a hell of a citation you chose:
Sure there's tons of energy in seawater... the nuclear reactor required to extract hydrogen from it is just a minor process detail. If that's the current state of the art in Army logistics, I fear for the future :/
Re:No maintenance? (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree to a point, and space is not 'empty', but there's a lot less stuff to wear and tear at a spacecraft when compared to any environment on the earths surface.
True, but there's also a lot more you can do to protect something from wear and tear when you're not concerned about its weight and cost to lift into orbit. It's actually much easier to make something on Earth that lasts that long than it is to make something for space that lasts that long. The reason we don't usually do so is it's even easier to make something that doesn't, and a lot less expensive to just service it as needed.
Re:No maintenance? Water and Ice (Score:5, Insightful)
Snow, water and ice are really nasty. If you live near significant snow, you will have watched things just "move" around. Year after year, you can watch a fence move, or a big rock slowly move across a yard.
In many ways, water and ice are worse than space. As the water thaws and freezes, it picks up and moves considerable structures. In Southern Canada, you just put your footings down below the frost line. In the Canadian shield, most people don't have basements because it would mean blasting granite. By the time you hit the arctic, there is so much snow and ice, it becomes logistically difficult to put in proper footings.
The Russians are talking about building boats for the nuclear reactor. Sea can be more stable than land in some ways. But what do you do when a great big iceberg is coming your way? These reactors must be connected to something via a cable. They won't be easy to move. Essentially, if one of these reactors ever becomes ice-locked, it would be in danger of getting its hull crushed and sinking.
These reactors have to withstand ice, year after year, without fail. How is that going to work? We haven't built an ice-breaker that can survive rough service without on-going maintenance. How is a stationary boat going to do it without maintenance?
Additionally, if a space probe goes missing, it is largely without significant environmental consequences for planet earth. If one of these reactors fails, it could dump radioactive waste into the arctic ocean. Thanks to the jet stream, all the oceans are interconnected, and that radioactivity will go world wide.