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...
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.
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]
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.
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?)
> A French company has designed a reactor called Flexblue that would not float but rather be submerged on the ocean floor.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
A 10' dinghy in deep water is pretty well invulnerable to tsunamis. Invulnerability to hurricanes would be an entirely different proposition.
> - 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.
A tsunami in sufficiently deep water is basically imperceptible. It’s only a problem once the sea floor starts pushing the water up.
You are safe in either direction, either 15 km inland of 15+ km offshore.
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.
Well the Australian government(s) aren't sane then.
Yeah, hasn’t that been pretty well established in a myriad of other ways?
I do not think there is a button somewhere is Beijing that China can use to just turn off Australian power plant on Australian soil.
The most China can do to sell the asset and temporary depress its price.
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.
There's still an electrical cable, but I would assume it's more durable than an underwater oil pipeline.
- defending some press release coming out of Russia.
How is the weather today in Moscow ?
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.
Also Germany is building HVDC lines from solar power plants is Spain. Depending on Russia has already got us in the mess where Europe is unable to hold them accountable for a lot of crimes they have committed on European soil.
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.
Note that Naftogaz (Ukraine gas organisation) later admitted to this theft, which was worth $3 billion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...
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
Doesn’t Europe, and in particular Germany, already do this with Russian natural gas?
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.
If your country has the capabilities to build reserve power plants why allow the Russians to get all the profit from the power market ? You could just spin up your gas plants indefinitely.
Nuclear power is also not cheap, and the main cost is associated with risk (disposing of waste, etc), I am sorry but if their is one area where you cant be cheap its nuclear power.
Also the countries that Russia seems to target are poor countries with weak governments like Sudan (not to mention Sudan's main cites are all far away from the coast). Most poor countries these days are located in perfect places for solar energy, which is anyway cheaper than nuclear.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
