The 10-year licence was issued by Russia’s state nuclear regulator Rostekhnadzor. Rosenergoatomm said earlier ths year it was expecting the licence to be issued in July.
Rosenergoatom director-general Andrei Petrov, said obtaining the licence was the result of many years of complex work to create a unique nuclear facility.
In August the Akademik Lomonosov will be towed from Murmansk, where trials have been taking place, to its base in Pavek, an Arctic port town in the country’s far northeastern region of Chukotka.
Work is underway in Pavek on coastal infrastructure needed to attach the floating plant to city power and heating grids.
In December, the Akademik Lomonosov is scheduled to begin supplying energy to Pevek.
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.
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.
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.
