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."
ahhh (Score:5, Interesting)
That is not a bad idea. I have thought that the west should be putting up more small reactors to run things like Manufacturing as well as our electric trains. Do some 10-20 MW next to a maglev or just old fashion hi-speed train like Frances, and you have a fairly efficient none polluting train.
Nuclear Power (Score:2, Interesting)
As much as I support the idea of expanding nuclear power something tells me that superheating the water near the ice caps is just going to cause them to melt faster (assuming they are light water reactors which would be the most economical, and that storing their own waste refers to the nuclear kind)... but what do I know I'm a /.'er not a nuclear physicist... oh wait.
No maintenance? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, TFA may have got it wrong, but "The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years" sounds quite impossible. Perhaps they mean it would need to be refueled once every 12 to 14 years.
Other than spacecraft there aren't many systems that can run 12 years unattended. To make things worse, there's the extreme climate conditions. Right, what can possibly go wrong?
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The US Had a bunch of these during the Cold War (Score:4, Interesting)
There was SL-1:
http://www.radiationworks.com/sl1reactor.htm [radiationworks.com]
They learned the hard way that you should not build a reactor so small that it requires *manual* withdrawal of control rods. By manual I mean a guy hunkered over the core with his hands on the rod itself. End result: said man impaled by said rod - to the ceiling.
U.S. Army shipboard nuclear reactor (Score:4, Interesting)
The US used to have a 45MW shipboard nuclear power plant on the USS Sturgis [army.mil], a converted Liberty ship. It was used to power the Panama Canal locks during a period of low water at Gatun Dam, the usual power source. The U.S. Army had a whole range of small reactors running in remote locations from 1952 to the early 1970s. The main problem was that they never built enough of them to justify the support and training infrastructure required.
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:3, Interesting)
With a geologically stable site and better materials technology we can think about how we can extract the energy from that plutonium and convert it to fissile ash (so the time frames are more manageable) perhaps using an extremely over-engineered version of IFR. End uranium mining and contain the enrichment facility in the same place as the containment and reactor facility, probably inside a mountain. Indeed a design worth developing but far far, far from being a commercial reality without overcoming the significant engineering and material science's issues.