They're alwasys a step behind.
Posted on 07/12/2010 10:01:55 AM PDT by Willie Green
Recently engineers from St. Petersburg celebrated launch of the first offshore nuclear power plant in the world, which was named after a great Russian scientist M. Lomonosov.
An offshore nuclear power plant (ONPP) is a low-power energy source, designed with help of Russian technologies of nuclear shipbuilding and aimed at supplying energy to Russians, inhabiting Far North, Far East and other remote territories of the Russian Federation.
The ONPP consists of a flush deck non-propelled vessel with two reactors of ice-breaking type. Each reactor has electrical capacity of 35 megawatt and thermal power of 140 gigacalories. The plant can also work as a desalination unit, which is very important for countries with limited fresh water. The plant can work almost anywhere, even in permafrost areas, and doesn’t require many supporting engineers.
We're too busy putting up pinwheels and solar battery chargers.
They're alwasys a step behind.
Forty years ago Con Ed (New York) proposed builing an artificial island in Long Island Sound and building huge nuclear power plants, mainly to overcome the objections of abutters. Still a very good idea.
Probably not.
First of all, a meltdown is exceedingly unlikely in a marine environment, where you can just submerge the entire reactor before it goes supercritical. A radiation spill underwater doesn’t get very far — its radius of effect is much, much smaller both than an oil spill and than a cloud of radioactive dust.
Second of all, modern reactors use designs based on pellet beds, which make it almost physically impossible to go supercritical.
As far as Chernobyl goes, it’s important not to confuse the plant’s integrity of design with its integrity of operation. The Chernobyl plant was, at its time, the most secure, fault-tolerant nuclear plant in the world. In fact, it was built with so many failsafes that its operational staffmembers decided that they weren’t needed at all, and spent most of their time goofing off and drinking. The day of the disaster, they decided to settle a bet to see how many failsafes they could deactivate and still avoid a meltdown. Turns out they all lost.
Evidently no one has heard of the USS Long Beach.
They're wrong about that.
The United States launched the first "off-shore" nuclear power plant back in 1961. It was called the USS Enterprise, and not only spent a great deal of time "off-shore", it was well armed and higly mobile! ;-)
My apologies.
The Long Beach preceded the Enterprise by about 3 years.
You sure these are pellet beds?
The ONPP consists of a flush deck non-propelled vessel with two reactors of ice-breaking type. Each reactor has electrical capacity of 35 megawatt and thermal power of 140 gigacalories. The plant can also work as a desalination unit, which is very important for countries with limited fresh water. The plant can work almost anywhere, even in permafrost areas, and doesn't require many supporting engineers.Wait, I've got an idea...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.