ST. PETERSBURG – Russia’s first and the world’s only floating nuclear powerplant has headed out to sea for its first sea voyage, its maker said onSaturday.
The floating plant, the Akademik Lomonosov, was towed out of the St.Petersburg shipyard where it was constructed. It is to be towed through theBaltic Sea and around the northern tip of Norway to Murmansk, where itsreactors are to be loaded with nuclear fuel.
The FNPP is intended for the generation and output of heat and electricpower and can also be used for seawater desalination.
The Lomonosov is to be put into service in 2019 in the Arctic off the coastof Chukotka in the far east, providing power for a port town and for oilrigs.
The plant is equipped with two reactors capable of producing up to 70megawatts of electric power and 50 gigacalories of heat in normal operatingconditions. This is enough power to support the life of a city with apopulation of about 100 thousand people, a statementlink>fromthe company read.
It will replace the retiring Bilibinskaya Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), whichis currently generating up to 80 percent of electric power in the isolatedChaun-Bilibinskaya grid.
The FNPP is designed to operate for about forty years.
The project, which is financed by state nuclear corporation Rosatom’ssubsidiary Rosenergoatom Concern JSC, has been widely criticized byenvironmentalists. Greenpeace has dubbed it a “floating Chernobyl.”