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."
Only one problem.... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Only one problem.... (Score:5, Funny)
It would be quite a mutation, to allow them to swim 20000km from the Antarctic to the Arctic...
Re:Only one problem.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Forget the penguins, it's the Kangaroos that you should worry about.
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You're all wrong, and you'll know how wrong you are when the swine flu zombies use fissile material stolen from these powerplants to tunnnel up from under the ground into your house and eat your faces off.
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Anyhow, delving down this polar bear / penguin thread got me to thinking... how about if we cross-introduce the species?
Think about it - give the penguins the diversity of the northern latitudes, and polar bears in the south pole wouldn't have to worry about drowning.
On second thought, the penguins will look like polar bear food each way, and the way
Re:Only one problem.... (Score:5, Funny)
Well that depends. Are they African or European?
Re:Only one problem.... (Score:4, Funny)
I haven't yet heard anyone tell me if they were unladen or not.
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There is an evil man that does have a following of evil Penguins. Somehow only a bat can take him down.
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Gnort would save us!
That sounds like a Major Disaster to me.
Re:Only one problem.... (Score:5, Funny)
is Major Disaster related to Colonel Panic or General Protection Fault?
Re:Only one problem.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Dark Helmet: Careful you idiot! I said across her nose, not up it!
Laser Gunner: Sorry sir! I'm doing my best!
Dark Helmet: Who made that man a gunner?
Major Asshole: I did sir. He's my cousin.
Dark Helmet: Who is he?
Colonel Sandurz: He's an asshole sir.
Dark Helmet: I know that! What's his name?
Colonel Sandurz: That is his name sir. Asshole, Major Asshole!
Dark Helmet: And his cousin?
Colonel Sandurz: He's an asshole too sir. Gunner's mate First Class Philip Asshole!
Dark Helmet: How many asholes do we have on thi
Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:2)
in 10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... now!
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really?
Yes, really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novaya_Zemlya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Peninsula
HTH,
HAND
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How would it melt down a pebble bed reactor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor [wikipedia.org]
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obvious to me first time I saw the plans for one - turn it upside down
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:5, Informative)
As you suggest, there are now a number meltdown-proof reactor designs. These are not merely engineered with "infallible" safety mechanisms, but are fundamentally meltdown-proof by their very design. As long as the laws of physics hold, which is a reasonably safe assumption, there is no risk of meltdown.
While the Pebble bed reactor is safe though, the nature of the pebbles make for very difficult reprocessing, and otherwise still pose a long term waste management problem.
Nuclear is the clear winner for clean, environmentally friendly energy production, but I would recommend pointing people to the Integral Fast Reactor [wikipedia.org] instead. An added benefit would be that such a design could also solve our current nuclear waste problems, by recycling it for use in such reactors. The true waste after recycling is both very minimal and very short lived by comparison.
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Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really? Who told you that?
The only serious nuclear incident in USSR history, Chernobyl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_Disaster [wikipedia.org]
Your case? (Score:2)
You said, "a result of combination of idiocy never seen before" thereby making the case that Russians are capable of unprecedented idiocy. Would you care to start over? Perhaps you meant to make some other point?
Granted, we have had our share of idiots in the US. Three Mile Island comes readily to mind. Somehow, our idiots surpassed your idiots in their ability to recover from idiocy.
I guess you have industrial grade idiots over there, huh? Fool proof idiots? We need to explore the subject of idiocy
You are wrong on so many levels (Score:4, Informative)
1) The main reason for the Chernobyl disaster was a bad reactor plant design. A SCRAM should never ever bring the reactor to explosion. After the disaster, the control rods were heavily modified. Also, the control team never did anything against the reactor user manual.
2) This problem with the design was known a couple of years before the Chernobyl accident. Both the reactors of Leningrad nuclear power plant and of the Ignalina nuclear power plant, reactors of the same type, had serious accidents of the same type (SCRAM caused a nearly runaway reaction). At this point the problem became known, the designers were informed of it and even got some recommendations how to redesign the control rods to avoid this kind of problems in the future. The designers decided that since they were very important, well-known and highly-decorated scientists, they don't have to listen to "common people". The result is known.
3) There were some other nuclear accidents in the USSR. The most prominent is Mayak.
Nonetheless USSR was one of the nuclear reactor pioneers. The first commercial nuclear power plant was a soviet one. And there were some decent reactors like the current VVER line.
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Also, the control team never did anything against the reactor user manual.
I read a very detailed, technical report of the accident about a year after it happened. The report was published in "Novy Mir" or some other "thick" magazine. The control team ran an unapproved experiment, days before the reactor was supposed to be turned over to production of energy. As part of that experiment they turned off some major cooling systems, manually, with huge valves, and placed padlocks on those valves so that nobod
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You should read more current technical reports. Back then IAEA received misinformation and blatant lies from the soviet government. All blame was shifted on the operators because of the "Communist Tech Cannot Fail" - syndrom.
Now we know, that although the operator shouldn't have altered the test programme in his own initiative, the crew actions never went against the reactor user manual (which I have also read - Russian is my native tongue).
Also, it wasn't reactor overheat which caused the rows to bend, it
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Not at all.
The test was only to look whether the energy won of the spin of the turbine in a shutdown process is enough to drive the cooling pumps for the time the backup diesel generators are starting (they need about a minute to go to full power). The test was fully approved and the reactor had adequate cooling for all time. To be absolutely correct, since according to the test plan additional water pumps were activated, the reactor was cooled much better than usual. The presence of so much water, which is
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Wouldn't Death Valley be underwater, as it is now below sea level? Also, even if that happens, wouldn't Superman just fly back in time and stop it?
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Exactly. He's investing in future lake front property.
Re:Ranting against "evil Russians" to commence... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why not use solar/nuclear power to power this process?
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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.
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Let [slashdot.org] me guess [slashdot.org], you're Russian?
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Roughest Seas? (Score:2)
Isn't that where the seas are the roughest?
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.
Re:The US Had a bunch of these during the Cold War (Score:2)
Several people died? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/ [msn.com]
If you have a problem with a nuclear facility and you kill 10 people, that says you're doing it correctly (Chernobyl is doing it wrong).
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.
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The reactor was not operated by "a guy hunkered over the core with his hands on the rod itself." The rod was manually withdrawn to reconnect it to its control mechanism [wikipedia.org] during a maintenance procedure.
It seems to me they learned the hard way that you shouldn't be yanking on a control rod during a maintenance procedure without having some kind of temporary mechanical stop in place to limit travel.
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How about a dedsign requirement that the core cannot go critical with even the most reactive single control rod totally removed from the reactor under any circumstances?
This is what we have now and is a direct result of that 1960 accident.
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.
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However you produce it, 70 MW of electrical power is going to have a lot of heat associated with it.
Re:Nuclear Power (Score:5, Informative)
oh wait what?
The power plant produces 70MW.
Assume that the equivalent of this energy is dissipated as heat.
Sunlight on the Earth surface is on average 164W/m^2, though at polar circle this drops to 80-100W/m^2. Snow at best reflects 90%, absorbing 10%.
70,000,000/(80*0.1)=8,750,000m^2=8.75km^2
So one power plant is an equivalent of sunlight collected over 8.76km^2 area. Arctic ocean is 14,056,000km^2. Power plant increases the amount of heat absorbed in the area by .00006%
Alternatively the same amount of power would have to be produced by the same Gazprom using -- guess what? -- things that Gazprom happens to produce, namely fuel.
Re:Nuclear Power (Score:4, Insightful)
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If the price of fossil fuel keeps going up, there comes a point where nuclear becomes cheaper, even on very small scales such as these. They'd be crazy not to sell the fossil fuel to paying customers, especially the crazy ones like us Brits who are scared of nuclear power.
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I assumed that produced power will be eventually dissipated as heat anyway (even if the source is different, such electricity delivered from somewhere else in a rather unrealistic best case scenario). So that would correspond to 50% efficiency, not 100%. I guess, too optimistic but still close enough.
If the argument was that any energy-consuming development in that area is bad, this would be invalid. However then I would have to compare its impact with similar industrial development elsewhere or other means
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
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Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Nuclear submarines (Score:5, Informative)
The west needs some all nuclear ships to ply the route between America and EU (no real chance of pirates) and perhaps across the pacific. This would drop CO2 emissions a great deal.
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Well, the problem is that it's only the cheapest considerably down the road. The Pentagon (with it's deep pockets) only considers universal nuclear power to be a good deal when oil rises (and remains) above (IIRC) $125/150 a barrel.
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not surprised that nobody uses nuclear for cargo ships. You need to spend a lot more money on your shipboard engineering crew (more people, higher salaries, more training), you need to build and maintain shore facilities to handle nuclear plant maintenance, and nowadays you'd need a respectably-sized security force on board and at the shore facility to make sure you didn't lose control of your nuclear materials to people that want to do something other than push cargo with it.
The US Navy decided to stop using nuclear power on cruisers because it was cheaper to use conventional power for some of the reasons above. Note that the power requirements for a cruiser [wikipedia.org] and a large container ship [wikipedia.org] are about the same.
The ongoing negative public sentiment towards nuclear is probably another big deciding factor.
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IIRC the cost of refueling was a major factor in that decision. Early designs needed refueling every few years, and this is a process that takes months.
Some additional data: according to this page [globalsecurity.org], in 1993 a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier cost 20% more to operate than a conventional-powered carrier, mainly due to the extra cost of refueling and decommissioning (ie removal of the irradiated parts).
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That's interesting about the early ships: it looks like the Long Beach [wikipedia.org] needed frequent refueling, but that was corrected in later designs, since some of the Virginia class ships went two decades without it. [globalsecurity.org]
Engine size (Score:2)
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Not really. You have to remember that the kind of uranium (only a few percent U-235) that powers a nuclear reactor is different from weapons grade enriched uranium (more than 90% U-235). Chain reaction cannot be produced with such material, although a meltdown that releases the radioactive material into the environment can happen—but how much fuel is a ship going to carry with it?
If you can't produce a chain reaction with the stuff loaded into the reactor, then it's pretty worthless for producing energy. True, you couldn't take it and make a real nuclear weapon, but it would be great for a dirty bomb.
Any terrorist with an ounce of dedication and engineering knowledge could make a big mess with a reactor if they had full control of the vessel long enough. Once the reactor has been operating for any length of time, there's a lot of nasty stuff in there, and if you really tried and k
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Did you know that your smoke detector in your home contains radioactive material (americium)?
Yep, a whopping 1 microCurie, maximum. Successfully releasing the innards of even a small reactor would release millions of Curies. That's not "a little radioactivity." Spreading that all over a few blocks of a port city probably wouldn't kill anybody on the spot, but it would make it unusable for a long time, because we have laws about how much of that stuff you can have lying around with people wandering about.
Yes, a lot of people are overly scared of any amount of radioactivity and/or radiation, but t
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A 70 MW reactor with a lifespan of 12 years without refueling doesn't have millions of Curies of Uranium. Ten thousand or so, perhaps, depending on the design.
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As the AC pointed out, the bulk of the radioactivity will be in fission products. [wikipedia.org] For a shiny new reactor that's been operating for only 1 year at 70MW, consider the amount of Sr-90 and Cs-137 (which have half-lives in the neighborhood of 30 years) that is left sitting in the reactor:
(70e6 watts)/(200 MeV per fission)*(31,556,926 seconds) = 6.89370014e25 fissions
(6.89370014e25 fissions)*(.045 Sr-90 atoms per fission + .06 Cs-137 atoms per fission) = 7.4451961512000006e+24 atoms
With a half-life of ~30 years
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Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature ...
So where do we mine Plutonium again?
Somebody please take the Informative moderation away from this comment. The highly radioactive fission products of a nuclear reactor have half times too short to occur naturally in any significant amount. Even an element like plutonium with the longest lasting isotope having a half time of 24,100 years decays way to quickly in comparison to the earth's age to have any meaningful deposits left. You can
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'In fact, to date the most infamous act of terrorism was performed with a transportation "vessel" filled with fossil fuel, not anything containing anything remotely radioactive.'
Nonsense; that act is far outweighed by shipping smallpox infected blankets.
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We've got several centuries' worth (at current usage levels) of uranium in our "waste storage sites", if only they'd construct breeder reactors to burn it.
Not to mention, there's effectively infinite uranium dissolved in the oceans. Separating it out would be costly, but not to the point of adding significantly to the cost of running a breeder reactor.
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Only problem with that being that no one has yet designed and built a workable breeder reactor.
Re:Nuclear submarines (Score:5, Informative)
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yes dual core. It is how they operate their underwater 30MW lasers. On their submarines
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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:Nuclear Portables (Score:2)
the russians are not unfamiliar with [englishrussia.com]the concept it seems.
PBS had a great documentary on how the US Army could set up and safely use portable nuclear power plants in the arctic, however no linkie could be found...
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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).
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I think its more like the Russians see oil as a political tool, they control the supply to most of Europe, so if they can get oil without wasting any that makes them more powerful!
Why? (Score:2)
If we're going to use nuclear power, why use small nuclear power plants to drill for oil, instead of using it directly? Isn't this the worst of both worlds?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
That's a record (Score:2)
...The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years...
That's a record in my opinion. For those concerned about hijacking, Russians have the technology and will to keep these monsters safe. They (the Russians), are almost always concerned about the results and not the means to get to the required results.
This is unlike we in the USA who have to be mindful of what the world will think about our actions.
This is a great idea. (Score:3, Funny)
That would be cool.
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 nuclea
Nothing Special! (Score:2)
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?
It wouldn't have any real impact since it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the other things heating the Arctic. The sun delivers order 100 hundred watts to each square meter of the earth, and even if most of that is reflected the absorbed power from the sun is orders and orders of magnitude above what these power plants will do (you can crunch the numbers if you want).
Moreover, if they weren't using nuclear power, they'd just use something else. Burning oil raises temperatures too. Nuclear power i
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And, shit-howdy, if any Slashdot story ever cried out for the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag, it was this one.
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.
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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 t
Sounds like our ZPM is out of power (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like our ZPM is out of power
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
HUH? (Score:2)
They use nuclear power to get OIL?
Which in turn is burned to get power?
Insane.
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Yet another reason why Canada needs a stronger presence in the Arctic, and the US needs to stop undermining Canadian sovereignty up there. Who would you rather have controlling the high Arctic: Canada, or Russia?
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Given Canada's environmental history and Russia's environmental history I know which country I would prefer to be in control of the Arctic archipelago and the surrounding ocean.
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:No maintenance? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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Well, one can explode and wipe out the polar bears for good. :-/
We won't be happy 'til bears don't come in that color anymore I guess.
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Seems like the particular extreme (cold) is ideal for something that might need supplemental/emergency cooling, eg, a nuclear reactor.
How is this any less safe than nuclear powered subs/carriers? In fact, if Russia has excess nuclear subs, I wonder why not just drive a few of them out there and use them instead of building something else.
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Oh? Not impossible. There's no requirement that a nuclear reactor have any moving parts that are prone to wearing out. Plus, space is a much harsher environment than the Arctic.
The Toshiba 4S [wikipedia.org] reactor, on paper, can go 30 years, but realistically probably will be 8 to 10 years between refuelings.