A point you might well have included is the topic (and perhaps, questions over authorship) of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's PhD thesis: "Mineral and Raw Materials Resources And the Development Strategy for the Russian Economy".
Yes, the article notes that, "The United States used a barge-based reactor to generate electricity for the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 until 1976, and Westinghouse, the American reactor builder, planned — but never built — two floating plants off the New Jersey coast at around that time"
1968! The interesting story is why the NYT's is running this and running with it now [not trying to be tin-hat, maybe it was just a slow news day, but you can find links posted on HN going back almost 5 years about this project]
It's a good idea. Afaik, naval nuclear power has a pretty good track record.
Who knows if that will continue for commercial power generation?
But at least it solves the stupid "perpetual one-off design" space nuclear power seems to have been stuck in. (Although I believe I read that at least France standardized all their reactor buildings?)
During a power crisis caused by a high tension cable breakdown Auckland depended on ship borne power. I'm pretty sure it was GE gas turbines. There is a well understood model for mobile power, I don't see why this model can't work and guy lots of use cases. Nuclear why not?
The loss of competence in nuclear engineering worldwide worries me. Do we need to start sending engineering grads to Brazil? Britain outsourced it's coming plants to China didn't it?
It's 2 x 70 MWe or about 300 MWt. A4W reactors on Nimitz class aircraft carriers produce about 2 x 550 MWt which translates to about 100 MWe and 2 x 104 MW shaft power for propulsion.
Its worth mentioning that new turbines for generating electricity are in development with higher output compared to the steam powered turbines. This will basically increase the electrical output of the nuclear plant with the same amount of fuel which will make NPPs even more viable in the future
The nuclear power plant of the future can be found in a science museum. All dangers of a catastrophic accident aside, nuclear energy has become economically infeasible. Just recently, half-build powerplants have been abandoned in the US for pure financial reasons, and the other projects under constructions face severe cost problems too. And this is not counting for the still unsolved problem of disposing the nuclear waste. Meanwhile, solar and wind have become much cheaper than nuclear, and counting in the construction costs for new clean plants, even coal.
The idea of putting a nuclear power plant on a float is faszinating. It solves cooling, allows relocation of the power plant and in the case of disaster, it can be dumped into the ocean, which is somewhat better than contaminating occupied land, but still isn't acceptable.
Unless there is some significant breakthrough in operating costs and safety as well as a solution for the nuclear waste, nuclear isn't the future.
I'm not sure what you mean by unsolved disposal. Nuclear waste from power plants is stored in secure facilities. It takes up a manageable amount of space, is low maintanance and isn't dangerous. Furthermore, future reactors will be able to reuse it; the current reactors only use up a small fraction of the fuel. So actually, you wouldn't even want to throw it away.
Also, nuclear fuel is advantageous logistically. A typical plant needs 1 train-load of fuel a year. That's a relatively small freight, you can ship that from anywhere around the world. On the other hand, for carbon-fuel powerplants, you need a train load of fuel per day.
I'd love to see the planet off non-renewable-fuels, but a big hurdle is that, unless we figure out storage, the renewable energy sources have to be supplemented with something for when it's night and there's no wind. I don't see a better option for that something than nuclear. Of course, an alternative would be for society to switch to an energy usage scheme that doesn't presume that power is uninterruptable. However, that would require profound changes to our everyday lives, and I don't think we're quite mature enough as a species to go through with something like that at scale.
>in the case of disaster, it can be dumped into the ocean, which is somewhat better than contaminating occupied land, but still isn't acceptable.
dumping the stuff into ocean results in spreading the stuff around the world. It is much more preferable to keep it contained - like in case of Chernobyl's 30km exclusion zone at least we have a chance 100years from now when technology allows to clean up the zone - no such luck if it happens in the open ocean. Fukushima is still fighting to contain the stuff on site and don't let it get out to avoid making the disaster into a global one.
>given the seeming importance of sobriety on such a vessel, have a drink at the bar.
if the journalists ever mentioned the "importance of sobriety on such a vessel" in the presence of the crew, i'm pretty sure it immediately became the next, right after "Za mirnyy atom!", popular drinking toast on that ship. "Nu! za osobuyu vazhnost trezvosti na yadernom reaktore." Amen.
These floating reactors aren't the future - you just don't want a potential Chernobyl delivered right to your city (just lookup the safety record of Russian nuclear submarines what these peaceful reactors are built after). These ships are a classic Russian solution (cheap, low tech simple/crude, without long-term thinking) to the typical Russian issue of lack of infrastructure at the time when climate change encourages and political situation pushes Russia to increase development in the North-East regions.
There isn’t a country on earth that would actually allow Russia to park an actual nuclear bomb off their coast. Even the ones aligned with Russia. Oh, how do you build a sarcophagus on a sunk nuclear reactor?
Uhm, you don't, because water is absolutely fantastic at blocking radiation - just several meters of it would block literally all radiation from a reactor gone critical. Not to mention that nuclear reactors are not bombs, not any more than coal fired power plant boilers are bombs.
There is no need to build a sarcophagus around a sunken nuclear reactor. Water is a great radiation stopper, to the extend that you can actually build and operate an "open" reactor where you can look directly down to the core and see the blue glow from the Cherenkov radiation. It would probably be wise to fence it off somehow.
> "Rosatom plans to serially produce such floating nuclear plants, and is exploring various business plans, including retaining ownership of the reactors while selling the electricity they generate."
No sane govt will allow a foreign power to literally be able to shutdown one of their cities on a whim.
I think what the Russian Govt realized is that instead of building nuclear power plants, its going to be more profitable to hold the electric grid of some country hostage, just like the hard profit they make holding Europe hostage with their gas pipelines.
EDIT:
There a lot more issues I have with their idea but that was the one most striking to me.
- How are going to supply electricity during a hurricane ? Most cites are located on the path to some hurricane / cyclone / tornado.
- Coastlines near cities are expensive real estate (not to mention anyone with property there allowing a literal power nuclear plant blocking their view ) - it takes important real estate from ports that are much more useful for docking ships, etc. Its possible to build a separate port far away from the city; but then you have to pay the extra cost of building some extra infrastructure to deal with the ship, at that point its just easier to build your own power plant.
- "Rosatom, in a statement, insisted its plant was 'invulnerable to tsunamis.'"
Really ?? why are they trying to sell dumb electricity when they have the much more valuable technology of invincible ships. How many tsunamis has one of their ships survived exactly ?
> - "Rosatom, in a statement, insisted its plant was 'invulnerable to tsunamis.'"
> Really ?? why are they trying to sell dumb electricity when they have the much more valuable technology of invincible ships. How many tsunamis has one of their ships survived exactly ?
A 10' dinghy in deep water is pretty well invulnerable to tsunamis. Invulnerability to hurricanes would be an entirely different proposition.
> "Rosatom, in a statement, insisted its plant was 'invulnerable to tsunamis.'"
> - Coastlines near cities are expensive real estate (not to mention anyone with property there allowing a literal power nuclear plant blocking their view ) - it takes important real estate from ports that are much more useful for docking ships, etc. Its possible to build a separate port far away from the city; but then you have to pay the extra cost of building some extra infrastructure to deal with the ship, at that point its just easier to build your own power plant.
Both of these are pretty easily solved by floating the plant a short distance off the shore and laying a power line along the sea floor. Tsunami's aren't an issue till right along the shore and the ship would practically disappear if it were just a bit off shore.
Well the Australian government(s) aren't sane then. We've been privatizing our power plants for decades, and iirc some owned by Government owned Chinese enterprises.
EDIT: For what it's worth. I don't have a problem with foreign ownership of the powerplants. But I do have a problem with privatization in a market without much competition.
Off shore drilling rigs aren’t anchored to he floor, but the pipe could literally snap if the rig floats away.
They are kept in place solely by GPS and thrust vectoring.
The Ruskies are going to use the same technology here, known for decades, and probably safer than oil rigs since there nothing to snap and a small volume to protect if the whole thing sinks.
No sane govt will allow a foreign power to literally be able to shutdown one of their cities on a whim.
Western Europe is already critically dependent on Russian gas pipelines, so this would be no biggie. Russia needs the foreign currency desperately so it won’t act lightly.
If that happened, the client government could nationalize the reactor and seize control of it. This would provoke a diplomatic incident, of course, but that'd be something for the two governments to sort out.
Or, less aggressively, they would retain enough reserve power generation capacity to replace the electricity. For example, have gas plants that can be spun up on demand if the nuclear reactors were shut off.
Either way, a government isn't going to be held ransom by Rosatom.
Only countries that can't or won't pay. Take Ukraine, all the gas destined for Germany and the Netherlands (people who have payed their bills on time since 1950) had to go through them. Russia couldn't shut down those Ukrainian deadbeats because then they would lose billions.
No. Reactors don't fail or explode anything like atomic bombs. The only way this could house a nuclear weapon is by having a hidden missile silo somewhere in it and they already have nuclear missile subs for discreetly placing nuclear weapons close to their target.
John McCarthy has an interesting website over nuclear energy [0]. I can't vouch for how actually true it is, but it seems reasonably well argued. This was his comment over nuclear waste:
> Q. What about nuclear waste?
> A. The waste consists of the fission products. They are highly radioactive at first, but the most radioactive isotopes decay the fastest. (That's what being most radioactive amounts to). About one cubic meter of waste per year is generated by a power plant. It needs to be kept away from people. After 10 years, the fission products are 1,000 times less radioactive, and after 500 years, the fission products will be less radioactive than the uranium ore they are originally derived from. The cubic meter estimate assumes reprocessing, unfortunately not being done in the U.S.
I'd always assumed 25,000 years for it to return to normal levels.
I am starting to get sick of environmentalists complaining, doing nothing to solve the issues their so "passionate" about, and then harassing / criticising any solution that gets proposed.
I don't think your example is anti-Russian—it's poor writing that's trying to be evocative and bring the reader into the scene. Obviously the writing would be in Cyrillic, but an amateur (or rushed) author would look to that detail to lend veracity or even exoticism when in fact it's just banal, as you rightly point out.
Cyrillic is the writing system Russian uses, English is one of the many using the Latin system.
I'm not seeing an anti-Russian slant here. The criticism is tame for an article on nuclear power, and they'd likely have the same concerns if this was a US project.
[+] [-] halhod|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|7 years ago|reply
A point you might well have included is the topic (and perhaps, questions over authorship) of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's PhD thesis: "Mineral and Raw Materials Resources And the Development Strategy for the Russian Economy".
https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/08/putin...
[+] [-] stochastic_monk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jabbernotty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|7 years ago|reply
The country is unveiling a floating nuclear power plant.
Um, "unveiling" ??
We've have floating nuclear power in submarines, aircraft carriers, maybe other vessels for half a century.
[+] [-] throwaway5752|7 years ago|reply
1968! The interesting story is why the NYT's is running this and running with it now [not trying to be tin-hat, maybe it was just a slow news day, but you can find links posted on HN going back almost 5 years about this project]
[+] [-] icc97|7 years ago|reply
Companies 'unveil' new cars every year, just because the basis has been done before does mean that you can't unveil it in a different format.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ethbro|7 years ago|reply
Who knows if that will continue for commercial power generation?
But at least it solves the stupid "perpetual one-off design" space nuclear power seems to have been stuck in. (Although I believe I read that at least France standardized all their reactor buildings?)
[+] [-] mikeash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanhoe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|7 years ago|reply
The loss of competence in nuclear engineering worldwide worries me. Do we need to start sending engineering grads to Brazil? Britain outsourced it's coming plants to China didn't it?
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petre|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor
[+] [-] lisk1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|7 years ago|reply
The idea of putting a nuclear power plant on a float is faszinating. It solves cooling, allows relocation of the power plant and in the case of disaster, it can be dumped into the ocean, which is somewhat better than contaminating occupied land, but still isn't acceptable.
Unless there is some significant breakthrough in operating costs and safety as well as a solution for the nuclear waste, nuclear isn't the future.
[+] [-] dmos62|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what you mean by unsolved disposal. Nuclear waste from power plants is stored in secure facilities. It takes up a manageable amount of space, is low maintanance and isn't dangerous. Furthermore, future reactors will be able to reuse it; the current reactors only use up a small fraction of the fuel. So actually, you wouldn't even want to throw it away.
Also, nuclear fuel is advantageous logistically. A typical plant needs 1 train-load of fuel a year. That's a relatively small freight, you can ship that from anywhere around the world. On the other hand, for carbon-fuel powerplants, you need a train load of fuel per day.
I'd love to see the planet off non-renewable-fuels, but a big hurdle is that, unless we figure out storage, the renewable energy sources have to be supplemented with something for when it's night and there's no wind. I don't see a better option for that something than nuclear. Of course, an alternative would be for society to switch to an energy usage scheme that doesn't presume that power is uninterruptable. However, that would require profound changes to our everyday lives, and I don't think we're quite mature enough as a species to go through with something like that at scale.
[+] [-] trhway|7 years ago|reply
dumping the stuff into ocean results in spreading the stuff around the world. It is much more preferable to keep it contained - like in case of Chernobyl's 30km exclusion zone at least we have a chance 100years from now when technology allows to clean up the zone - no such luck if it happens in the open ocean. Fukushima is still fighting to contain the stuff on site and don't let it get out to avoid making the disaster into a global one.
[+] [-] trhway|7 years ago|reply
if the journalists ever mentioned the "importance of sobriety on such a vessel" in the presence of the crew, i'm pretty sure it immediately became the next, right after "Za mirnyy atom!", popular drinking toast on that ship. "Nu! za osobuyu vazhnost trezvosti na yadernom reaktore." Amen.
These floating reactors aren't the future - you just don't want a potential Chernobyl delivered right to your city (just lookup the safety record of Russian nuclear submarines what these peaceful reactors are built after). These ships are a classic Russian solution (cheap, low tech simple/crude, without long-term thinking) to the typical Russian issue of lack of infrastructure at the time when climate change encourages and political situation pushes Russia to increase development in the North-East regions.
[+] [-] siculars|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gambiting|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hvidgaard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wrong_variable|7 years ago|reply
No sane govt will allow a foreign power to literally be able to shutdown one of their cities on a whim.
I think what the Russian Govt realized is that instead of building nuclear power plants, its going to be more profitable to hold the electric grid of some country hostage, just like the hard profit they make holding Europe hostage with their gas pipelines.
EDIT:
There a lot more issues I have with their idea but that was the one most striking to me.
- How are going to supply electricity during a hurricane ? Most cites are located on the path to some hurricane / cyclone / tornado.
- Coastlines near cities are expensive real estate (not to mention anyone with property there allowing a literal power nuclear plant blocking their view ) - it takes important real estate from ports that are much more useful for docking ships, etc. Its possible to build a separate port far away from the city; but then you have to pay the extra cost of building some extra infrastructure to deal with the ship, at that point its just easier to build your own power plant.
- "Rosatom, in a statement, insisted its plant was 'invulnerable to tsunamis.'"
Really ?? why are they trying to sell dumb electricity when they have the much more valuable technology of invincible ships. How many tsunamis has one of their ships survived exactly ?
[+] [-] scrumper|7 years ago|reply
A 10' dinghy in deep water is pretty well invulnerable to tsunamis. Invulnerability to hurricanes would be an entirely different proposition.
[+] [-] rtkwe|7 years ago|reply
> - Coastlines near cities are expensive real estate (not to mention anyone with property there allowing a literal power nuclear plant blocking their view ) - it takes important real estate from ports that are much more useful for docking ships, etc. Its possible to build a separate port far away from the city; but then you have to pay the extra cost of building some extra infrastructure to deal with the ship, at that point its just easier to build your own power plant.
Both of these are pretty easily solved by floating the plant a short distance off the shore and laying a power line along the sea floor. Tsunami's aren't an issue till right along the shore and the ship would practically disappear if it were just a bit off shore.
[+] [-] cr1895|7 years ago|reply
A tsunami in sufficiently deep water is basically imperceptible. It’s only a problem once the sea floor starts pushing the water up.
[+] [-] coenhyde|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: For what it's worth. I don't have a problem with foreign ownership of the powerplants. But I do have a problem with privatization in a market without much competition.
[+] [-] fghhfgg|7 years ago|reply
They are kept in place solely by GPS and thrust vectoring.
The Ruskies are going to use the same technology here, known for decades, and probably safer than oil rigs since there nothing to snap and a small volume to protect if the whole thing sinks.
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
Western Europe is already critically dependent on Russian gas pipelines, so this would be no biggie. Russia needs the foreign currency desperately so it won’t act lightly.
[+] [-] pizzetta|7 years ago|reply
Hasn't Gasprom done this [cut supply] in the past but continues to have customers in Europe? If it's cheap enough they will probably have customers.
[+] [-] fghhfgg|7 years ago|reply
Make its e-supply more reliable, yes. But not replace the bulk of the supply. For that Rosatom will sell you a few GW units on land
[+] [-] rdl|7 years ago|reply
Doesn’t Europe, and in particular Germany, already do this with Russian natural gas?
[+] [-] a-priori|7 years ago|reply
Or, less aggressively, they would retain enough reserve power generation capacity to replace the electricity. For example, have gas plants that can be spun up on demand if the nuclear reactors were shut off.
Either way, a government isn't going to be held ransom by Rosatom.
[+] [-] phobosdeimos|7 years ago|reply
Only countries that can't or won't pay. Take Ukraine, all the gas destined for Germany and the Netherlands (people who have payed their bills on time since 1950) had to go through them. Russia couldn't shut down those Ukrainian deadbeats because then they would lose billions.
The world is not black or white.
[+] [-] spekulatius2410|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] accnumnplus1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urchony|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icc97|7 years ago|reply
> Q. What about nuclear waste?
> A. The waste consists of the fission products. They are highly radioactive at first, but the most radioactive isotopes decay the fastest. (That's what being most radioactive amounts to). About one cubic meter of waste per year is generated by a power plant. It needs to be kept away from people. After 10 years, the fission products are 1,000 times less radioactive, and after 500 years, the fission products will be less radioactive than the uranium ore they are originally derived from. The cubic meter estimate assumes reprocessing, unfortunately not being done in the U.S.
I'd always assumed 25,000 years for it to return to normal levels.
[0]: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html
[+] [-] dang|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricksanch88|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
What? So Russians would have warning signs in English?
Indeed, the article overall sounds like anti-Russia propaganda. What's going on with the NY Times about Russia and China? Just grasping for clickbait?
[+] [-] ordinaryradical|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|7 years ago|reply
I'm not seeing an anti-Russian slant here. The criticism is tame for an article on nuclear power, and they'd likely have the same concerns if this was a US project.