On the Академик Ломоносов floating nuclear plant

Around year 2000 Rosatom initiated a project to mass-produce floating nuclear plants that could be tugged to any destination world-wide, as an alternative to building nuclear plants on-site. The plan was to have 5 plants ready by 2015 (source: wikipedia) - obviously there have been some delays, because the first one, Akademik Lomonsov was completed in the end of April. It's now under tow on the way to Murmansk (spotted outside Senja this Sunday, doing 6 knots, so probably arriving to Murmansk very soon now).

(Marit Hommedal / NTB Scanpix)

The initial plan was to fuel the reactor in St.Petersburg, but the plan was later changed to fuel it in Murmansk - a move appreciated both by the locals in St.Petersburg, as well as the countries passed by the towed reactor.

This reactor will be deployed in the far east harbour of Pevek, the northernmost town in Russia as well as Asia. It's supposed to replace the aging Bilibino power plant.

Critics in Greenpeace, the Norwegian environmental organization Bellona and quite some other environmentalists are against the whole concept, deeming it unsafe. The phrasing "Chernobyl on water" as well as "Chernobyl on ice" has been used, though it's silly rhetoric, modern nuclear reactors are much safer than the Chernobyl-style reactors. The containment structure of a floating nuclear plant is probably less robust than on a modern land-based power station. However, the risks are most likely smaller for such a barge purposely constructed to be a nuclear plant, and permanently moored up in a sheltered harbour, compared to all the nuclear powered submarines, aircraft carriers and icebreakers out there.

A week ago or so, my parents-in-law came for a visit, my father-in-law is a nuclear engineer so naturally I asked him about his opinions. Unfortunately we never got to touch the security-aspect. My father-in-law was generally very negative to the plant - though, I assume the fact that he didn't mention security at all means it's a pretty safe reactor. He may be biased and bitter - a decade or two ago he was working on designing a land-based replacement of the Bilibino plant, when some big boss in Rosatom ordered them to stop, because he had "better ideas". At the other hand, he was happy to recently have earned some money recently doing consulting work allowing the Bilibino plant to operate for three more years (doing simulations using some ancient american-made Fortran code, on a his oldest working laptop).

The comments from my father-in-law was mostly going in the direction of "it doesn't make sense at all". The point of making floating barges should be to save costs and time, but apparently there are neither cost savings nor time savings involved.

Construction of the barge has taken like 15 years, and it's at least another year before it's ready to use, perhaps two years. A land-based plant wouldn't take more time to build, it can be produced in parts, shipped up relatively fast by ordinary freight ships and assembled relatively fast on the site. The barge can only be towed in some 2-3 knots (seems like he was wrong on that account, I think the trip from St.Petersburg and around the Scandinavian peninsula has gone quite fast, and the speed was observed to be 6 knots), the North-East Passage can be particularly challenging for such a tow, it can't follow an icebreaker like ordinary freight ships.

The total cost of building a new replacement power plant on the current Bilibino site would also be a lot lower than the Akademik Lomonosov project. In general, construction is very difficult up there due to the perma frost in the ground, the extreme cold and the lack of summer roads. By now they are currently building a new ultra-secure harbour for the power plant. The Bilibino plant is not located by the coast, it's actually located quite much inland, and it's not without a reason - it's powering local gold mines, that's what they need nuclear power for in such a sparsely populated area. So, with the power now produced in Pevek rather than Bilibino, several hundred kilometres of power lines have to be built - in the perma frost. In those conditions, the ground is constantly moving, and power lines have a tendency to have outages due to the poles tipping over.

At the other hand, Bilibino has all the facilities needed already in place - a hydro dam providing cooling water, powerlines to the consumers, etc.