6 Nov (NucNet): The first of two reactors on Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant, Akademik Lomonosov, has been started up and achieved first criticality, Russian equipment manufacturer Atomenergomash said in a statement on its website.
The physical launch of the starboard reactor took place on 2 November. The reactor has reached a minimum controlled power level, Atomenergomash said.
The vessel is scheduled to be towed from Murmansk, where fuel loading and startup 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.
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.
