Nukes on Ice?

Picture float­ing nuclear reac­tors sail­ing the seven seasgen­er­at­ing emer­gency power at dis­as­ter sites, pro­vid­ing fresh water dur­ing droughts, and warm­ing the shiv­er­ing cit­i­zens of Siberia.
Now, add indomitable ice floes, highly enriched ura­nium, hel­la­cious weather, and ter­ror­ists slaver­ing over lightly guarded nuclear fuel. Apply a “Made in Russia” stamp and file these titans under Technological Terrors.
On June 14 the Severnoye Mashinostroitelnoe Predpriyatie (more com­monly known as Sevmashpredpriyatie, or Sevmash ship­yard, one of many Russian sites burst­ing with nuclear waste, signed a con­tract to con­struct a float­ing nuclear power plant. Sevmash will install pairs of KLT-​​40S reac­tors (also some­times called KLT-​​40C because of translit­er­a­tion errors, or just KLT-​​40) on barges. The Russian ice­breaker fleet uses the same KLT-​​40 reac­tor type, fueled by high-​​enriched ura­nium (roughly 40% enriched). However, accord­ing to the Uranium Information Center, the float­ing reac­tors have been mod­i­fied to use low-​​enriched fuel. Other spe­cific dif­fer­ences between the reac­tors on the ice­breaker fleet and those on the float­ing plants remain unclear.
(Note: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pub­lished a short blurb [titled “Russias Sea Change”] about these float­ing plants in its lat­est issue. However, their piece asserts the reac­tor design will ten­ta­tively be a VBER-​​300. My sources almost uni­formly say that the KLT-​​40S will def­i­nitely be the reac­tor for this ini­tial, pilot project. The VBER-​​300 is being dis­cussed for use in a pro­posed larger float­ing reac­tor, but the larger ver­sion is, as of now, only hypo­thet­i­cal.)
At full capac­ity, the two reac­tors together will pro­vide up to 70 megawatts of power. They are also capa­ble of desali­nat­ing water, though it is unclear whether this can be done at the same time as power pro­duc­tion. There are 11 other pos­si­ble sites for these plants in Russia, but very few regional lead­ers have expressed inter­est. Rosatom, the Russian civil­ian nuclear power agency, now hopes to sell them to inter­ested coun­tries in Asia once the design has been suc­cess­fully demon­strated. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines have already expressed inter­est.
On the sur­face, this may not seem such a bad idea. Proposals for mobile nuclear plants as desali­na­tors have a long his­tory they dont pro­duce green­house gases and they could get to remote loca­tions eas­ily. Such a human­i­tar­ian sheen takes the edge off nuclear jit­ters, too. Fuel will be stored onboard and, to assuage pro­lif­er­a­tion con­cerns, the Russians claim that the barges will come back to Russia every 4–12 years for fuel dis­posal.
All indi­ca­tions, though, point to (dare I say typ­i­cally Russian?) poor plan­ning, with poten­tial for seri­ous problems.

The most glar­ing prob­lem: the barges wont be able to move with­out help. According to a Russian gen­eral cited in Pravda Online, a small squadron of tug­boats (likely 8–10) will move the plants around. For most of their lives, these plants will sit, barnacle-​​like, in shal­low waters, and their emer­gency use­ful­ness will be nil.
Barnacled behav­ior also makes for a pre­car­i­ous secu­rity sit­u­a­tion: in a civil war, for exam­ple, the plants would be prime, immo­bile tar­gets for rebels or ter­ror­ists. No one knows whether Russias over­stretched navy or the host coun­try­what­ever it may bewill pro­vide secu­rity.
It also seems that no plans exist to harden the barges against ice, even though the first dozen or so will be used off the often-​​icebound north­ern coast of Russia. Perhaps offi­cials fig­ure a cou­ple more drowned reac­tor cores will be mere drops in the ocean of radioac­tive waste already dumped in the region.
And while the fuel, which will for­mally remain in Russian cus­tody, is sup­posed to be low-​​enriched ura­nium, it could be switched out for highly enrichede­ven weapons grade­fuel with rel­a­tively minor changes to the reac­tor. The use of a design that orig­i­nally used HEU makes this pos­si­bil­ity even more wor­ri­some. Russia already has mas­sive stocks of HEU, which, if used, would let the reac­tor run longer with­out refu­el­ing. Though HEU is admit­tedly easy to blend down, if Russia runs out of money, or gets lazy, using the HEU as is might be an attrac­tive alter­na­tive to tug­ging the barges back to the moth­er­land for more fuel every few years.
China has offered fund­ing in exchange for a role in build­ing the barges, but Russian offi­cials declined because of tech­nol­ogy trans­fer con­cerns. They were prob­a­bly con­cerned that China would learn enough to build its own plants and steal mar­ket share from the Russian project.
Interestingly, Rosatom decided not to cap­i­tal­ize strongly on the need for desali­na­tion capac­ity, but rather to focus on the much more emo­tion­ally charged nuclear power gen­er­a­tion capa­bil­ity of their plants. Im at a loss for why this might be. Focusing on the human­i­tar­ian aspects of these plants would improve their mar­ketabil­ity for buy­ers abroad.
Moscow will fund the first few plantsto be sited in the frigid, poor north­ern states of Russia, who scarcely need con­vinc­ing­but the via­bil­ity of the project depends on find­ing for­eign buy­ers. Since Russian experts believe the desali­na­tion mar­ket alone will reach $12 bil­lion by 2015, the focus on power pro­duc­tion is baf­fling. Perhaps there is more to the project, but it is hard to tell for now.
Scanty reli­able infor­ma­tion on these plants exists, but we know they are being built. Rosatom offi­cials have so far only offered broad, vaguely con­de­scend­ing plat­i­tudes as reas­sur­ance that these plants will be safe. Some claim that secu­rity will not be a prob­lem because Sevmash is located in a high-​​security zone, but Pravda Online reports the plant will actu­ally be open to the pub­lic. Others say the plant will have “five inde­pen­dent safety bar­ri­ers,” and that “[l]eakage wont occur even if a plane or a heli­copter crashes into the float­ing block.” The Russians will per­haps for­give me if I dont find these reas­sur­ances effec­tive, espe­cially in light of their usual utter frank­ness.
Rosatom act­ing direc­tor Sergey Obozov stated that “the reli­a­bil­ity of off­shore NPP [nuclear power plants] will be the same with the Kalishnikov gun.” Even if reli­a­bil­ity is not an issue, the com­par­i­son to AK-​​47s is unfor­tu­nate. Do we really want cheap float­ing nuclear plants pro­lif­er­at­ing into volatile regions, used indis­crim­i­nately by ter­ror­ists and despots?
– Eric Hundman
(Eric Hundman is a research assis­tant at the World Security Institute’s Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC. He grad­u­ated from Yale University in 2006 with degrees in physics and polit­i­cal science.)

July 31st, 2006 | Nukes, Ships and Subs | 20605 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/07/31/nukes-on-ice/Nukes+on+Ice%3F2006-07-31+19%3A22%3A31sharon_weinberger You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.