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Fuel Loading Begins Of Second Floating Nuclear Station Reactor, Says Russia

By David Dalton
2 October 2018

Fuel Loading Begins Of Second Floating Nuclear Station Reactor, Says Russia
The Akademik Lomonosov floating nuclear power station in Murmansk. Photo courtesy Rosatom.

2 Oct (NucNet): Russia has begun loading fuel into the second of two nuclear reactor units on the floating nuclear power station Akademik Lomonosov, state nuclear corporation Rosatom said.

The loading is expected to take five days, Rosatom said. Loading of the first unit was carried out in July.

The 21,000-tonne vessel has two Russian-designed KLT-40S reactor units with an electrical power generating capacity of 35 MW each, sufficient for a city with a population of around 200,000 people.

Weather permitting, the vessel will be towed from Murmansk, where the fuel loading is taking place, to its base in Pavek, an Arctic port town in the country’s far northeastern region of Chukotka, in August or September 2019.

The Akademik Lomonosov will be the first vessel of a proposed fleet of floating plants with small pressurised water reactor units that can provide energy, heat and desalinated water to remote and arid areas of Russia.

It will be the first floating nuclear station to be built and deployed since the MH-1A, also known as the Sturgis, in the US in 1967. The Sturgis was towed to the Panama Canal Zone that it supplied with 10 MW of electricity from October 1968 to 1976.

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