The Nuclear Power Plant of the Future May Be Floating Near Russia

[StevieM]

~snip~

MURMANSK, Russia — Along the shore of 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. Out on the bay, submarines have for decades stalked the azure waters, traveling between their port and the ocean depths.

Here, Russia is conducting an experiment with nuclear power, one that backers say is a leading-edge feat of engineering but that critics call reckless.

The country is unveiling a floating nuclear power plant.

Tied to a wharf in the city of Murmansk, the Akademik Lomonosov rocks gently in the waves. The buoyant facility, made of two miniature reactors of a type used previously on submarines, is for now the only one of its kind.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/business/energy-environment/russia-floating-nuclear-power.html

[OxQQme]

1. I was told by an old Navy submariner

that a nuclear sub's reactor output could power all of a town of 50-60k.
He was a crew member on one and described the actual reactor, inside of all the attendant cooling and safety containment, is the size of a 55 gallon oil barrel.
I don't know if it's truth or not, but I imagine any of the aircraft carriers could do more than this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_submarine

[CentralMass]

2. What could possibly go wrong?

[NNadir]

3. The same thing that always goes "wrong."

Nuclear power suffers from the perception that if one person dies from radiation anywhere at anytime, everyone on the planet will continue to ignore the 70 million deaths that take place every decade from air pollution and announce "nuclear power is too dangerous."

Nuclear power also suffers from the claim that if radiation leaks any where at any time, say - as a very dumb guy once informed me here - if a tunnel collapses at a nuclear weapons plant, then it will be perfectly OK to completely destroy the planetary atmosphere, because, um, the tunnel...

If I understand this correctly, the tunnel must have wiped out the Pacific Northwest.

This has, in my view, been "going wrong" for half a century. No one now living will ever see a concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste below 400 ppm in their lifetimes. That's clearly what "went wrong" with nuclear power.

Despite the fact that nuclear power prevented almost 2 million deaths, and that it set back dangerous fossil fuel waste releases by about 30 billion tons - almost a years worth - it, um, has been "going wrong all along."

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

What always "goes wrong" with nuclear power is that it is the focus of extreme selective attention by people who can't think very well.

Have a wonderful work week.

[hunter]

4. The article doesn't mention plans to replace the Bilibino Nuclear Power plant

This plant has four light water cooled graphite reactors, scaled down versions of the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl.

Safety-wise, the Akademik Lomonosov is likely an improvement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilibino_Nuclear_Power_Plant