Hard to say if this is a good or bad idea.
But I guess if it goes wrong, it'll go very wrong.
It's the same with nuclear in almost every context: it's extremely efficient, it's cheap in the long run, and it doesn't damage the environment the same way coal does. But if something does
happen, an accident, like the reactor blowing up, it will be nothing less than a catastrophe.
This could have huge potential, but people are still very sceptical and afraid.
I feel like catastrophic is an overstatement. Nuclear disasters are overstated in terms of environmental and human impact. I'd be much more worried about an oil tanker docking there to feed an oil burning plant, which probably happens on a daily basis without concern. I doubt this plant is big enough to be any massive disaster if something does go wrong.
It's not really a novel idea, the USA had a similar platform supplying electricity to the Panama Canal for some years in the 60s.
I see no reason why this would be more risky than, lets say an ordinary nuclear submarine (of which a handful have been scuttled or sunk already, without any significant environmental impact, turns out having a nearly infinite amount of coolant nearby does make things safer).
“Nuclear reactors bobbing around the Arctic Ocean will pose a shockingly obvious threat to a fragile environment which is already under enormous pressure from climate change,” Jan Haverkamp, nuclear expert for Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, said in a statement last month."
Why bring climate change into the argument? But since you did, what about the coal-powered plant it is set out to replace? Which would you prefer?
Greenpeace can be a bit nutty sometimes.
Meh, way more people die every year from other energy sectors than nuclear.
Can't imagine this is any more dangerous than nuclear powered submarines. If something goes Chernobyl-wrong, they can just sink it to the bottom of the ocean
To a degree, its got a better failsafe than some land plants in that sense.
Greenpeace is nutty most times. They're a shitty organization that hampers nuclear development because their hateboner from the 70s over nuclear bomb testing. Greenpeace sucks at actual intelligent environmentalism.
“50 people used to live here, now it’s a ghost town...”
I'm pretty sure the ocean is big enough to give a shit about being used to drown a runaway reaction
I think the main concern is the contamination of waters and wildlife with moderate half-life radioactive fission products, rather than the reaction itself.
Is it at all possible Russia could be deploying this Nuclear barge right across the Bering strait to "accidentally" have an environment disaster close to U.S. soil?
"Oops! Our super experimental reactor just spilled nuclear waste right next door! Sorry!"
The ocean provides nearly infinite reactor cooling and near infinite dilution of any escaping radioactive material. Sitting at the bottom of the ocean is a very good place for nuclear material to end up, of course it'd be better to fish it back up but might not be worth it...
Not really. Russia would be responsible and have to rake out for the clean up. Russia has a bad past of being able to afford that.
This is the kind of paranoid fearmongering that makes people fear nuclear power. While you might be in jest, this same comment on say, Twitter may garner serious replies.
Dang, you're right.
I would like to see adoption of Nuclear power too.
So Russia invested untold millions of dollars in a state of the art reactor just to make it malfunction. Okay. Even if Russia actually wanted to commit environmental sabotage, there's far cheaper and less traceable methods than intentionally engineering a mobile Chernobyl.
If I'm not wrong the main environmental problem, other than the construction of the site will be the disposal of the water used as coolant.
I don't know how much does the water heat up, but let's say it's dumped into the ocean at 30C. Hot water has less oxygen dissolved in it than cold water, maybe it could affect the local fauna through oxygen deprivation in addition to the temperature difference, but I haven't looked up any papers that mention the effects of water disposal in nuclear reactors.
It will probably be lessened by the higher amounts of surrounding water and bigger difference in temperature, yet it might still have an effect.
“Nuclear reactors bobbing around the Arctic Ocean will pose a shockingly
obvious threat to a fragile environment which is already under enormous
pressure from climate change,” Jan Haverkamp, nuclear expert for
Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, said in a statement last month.
This might be true on a macro level, but my nuke teacher said that some portions of the scientific community suggest that currents and ingestion by local fauna may end up funneling relatively high concentrations of material up the food chain, rather than let it diffuse and dilute in the ocean.
Is there any actual evidence for that
Water is very good at absorbing radiation. You can swim in the water above a nuclear reactor or fuel rod pool and you're safe, it's only if you were to dive down into it that it'll cause you a real big issue.
If anything sinking this plant if it comes to it is probably the most safe way to contain it. Else it will only end up like the rest of the aging old nuclear powered ships and subs from the soviet era that just literally sit in one naval base rusting and contaminating the area.
I'd argue that the same holds true on land with air currents only far less diluted.
You don't get attacked by tsunamis or earthquakes on the open ocean. The only 2 downsides I see is Russians engineering a nuclear powerplant(jk) and corrotion forcing the reactor to undergo a hull change once every few years.
A flying nuclear reactor is a shit idea but a floating one, while a bigger challenge than a land based facility is a pretty decent one.
The barge contains two KLT-40S nuclear reactors originally designed for Russian/Soviet nuclear icebreakers with an output of 300MW_thermal each or 70MW-electrical each plus (?) desalination of 240,000 m^3 of water and district heating.
The reactors are fuelled with 14.1% U235 fuel (compared to the 40 to 90% used on the icebreakers) so they should be proliferation resistant. The design is a very conventional pressurised water reactor design (i.e. like almost every reactor in West and nearly every modern Russian reactor).
I don't see anything strikingly wrong with it, people should just disregard anything Greenpeace says on the matter with the hateboner going on. Some people have suggested (primarily people promoting MSRs) that seaborne PWRs should be safer than land based reactors as you will always have a heatsink available to cool the reactor in the form of the ocean, precluding any possibility of a meltdown.
The IAEA has a technical sheet for the reactors if anyone is interested: https://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/aris/2013/25.KLT-40S.pdf
Strange, when you tag my name was I supposed to get a notification?
They should be able to easily prove that then. Huge amounts of nuclear testing ireleased huge amounts of radioactive isotopes into the ocean involving far more radiation than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined. My immediate thought though is the solubility of radioisotopes. Generally if a compound is soluble in water it doesn't bio-accumulate very easily and if it's not water soluble it will sink as sediment to the ocean floor (obviously causing a problem for bottom feeders) but limited in geographical area. I'm not an expert on oceans though.
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