Russia plans to launch the world’s first floating nuclear power plant in 2010 — a two-reactor barge the size of a football field. The idea is to sail it around the Arctic Ocean bringing electricity to isolated coastal towns, where shipping coal or other fossil fuels is inefficient and unprofitable. The ship will store its nuclear waste on board for 10 or 20 years at a time, which is fine because, you know, ships never sink.
The party poopers over at Popular Science call the ship a “looming environmental disaster” with “potentially devastating environmental consequences.” From their write-up:
[…] because the safety of the Russian facility is still unknown, the prospect of resurrecting the Westinghouse idea in the White Sea has drawn protest from environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the Norwegian foundation Bellona. One concern is that a boat could ram the plant and spill waste into the water. An even bigger fear is that a nasty storm could cut the plant off from the land-based power supply required to run plant operations. Should emergency generators fail, says David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Chernobyl-like disaster could ensue. In a worst-case scenario, an overheated core could melt through the bottom of the barge and drop into the water, creating a radioactive steam explosion. Such a cloud could do far more damage than the plume of nuclear fallout kicked up by the 1986 explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former U.S.S.R., Lochbaum notes, because the human body absorbs radioactive water droplets more easily than it does radioactive ash. “Its worst day would be much worse than a land power plant’s,” he says.
Adding fuel to the fire, so to speak, is the fact that the ship’s nuclear cooling system is apparently as yet unproven, and the company building the thing refuses to say if the ten-year-old design has been updated to reflect new safety measures. Plus, maybe I’ve seen Mission Impossible too many times, but how tough could it possibly be for a bunch of motivated, well-equipped villain types to hijack/blow up/sink/crash into the ship as it floats alone in the middle of nowhere? As any good general knows, mobility also brings vulnerability, and unless it doubles as an aircraft carrier and has a submarine or two escorting it around, this just might end up being the most vulnerable nuclear plant in the world.
I have to admit, this project is as cool as it is frightening — imagine a mobile electricity source capable of powering entire towns without pumping any of Russia’s plentiful coal, oil or natural gas into the atmosphere. If strong safety measures can ensure that this isn’t just a bigger, badder Chernobyl waiting to happen, and if a few years go by without any radioactive steam clouds drifting over Russia, this could eventually become a model in places like Canada, which also has isolated coastal towns in frigid but increasingly important resource-rich regions. It could even be a plank in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s platform on Arctic sovereignty, meant as much to solidify Canada’s presence in the North as to bring reliable heat and light to Northern residents who rely on long-distance fossil fuel shipments to keep them from freezing in the dark.
Image via Popular Science.
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