Floating NPP to be set afloat
The world’s first floating nuclear power plant will be set afloat on Wednesday. The plant will be operational in the Russian Arctic by the end of 2012.
The solemn ceremony marking the launching of the plant will take place at the Baltic shipyard in St. Petersburg on Wednesday June 30, reports the press office of Russia’s State nuclear Agency Rosatom.
After put on sea, the floating nuclear power plant, named Akademik Lomonosov, will be completed and undergo different stages of testing before it will sail to the north during the autumn 2012.
The construction of Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant started at the Sevmash yard in Severodvinsk in April 2007, but in August 2008 Rosatom transferred the assignment to the Baltiiskii Yard in Sankt Petersburg. Before Christmas last year BarentsObserver reported that transfering the construction from Severodvinsk to St. Petersburg did not bring progress to the project.
Last year, Rosatom and Russia’s Far Eastern Republisc of Yakutia signed an agreement for implementing investments to build four floating nuclear power plants for use in the northern coastal areas of the Siberian Republic.
After completion at the Baltic shipyard in St. Petersburg, the plant will be towed out of the Baltic Sea and all the way along the coast of Norway before sailing into the Arctic waters to their ports in Yakutia.
When the plants need maintance and change its highly radioactive spent nuclear, normally after 4-5 years, it will be towed back to Murmansk or Arkhangelsk regions. Today, spent fuel can be transferred either at a naval yard on the Kola Peninsula or in Severodvinsk, but it could take plant at the civilian Atomflot base, outskirts Murmansk. From Atomflot, spent nuclear fuel is shipped by train to the Mayak reprocessing plant in the South-Urals.
