According to Rosenergoatom, the floating facility is scheduled to begin commercial generation of electricity in 2020 and will also be connected to the regional district heating network.
In September 2019, the Akademik Lomonosov docked at its base in the Arctic port of Pevek, Chukotka.
The station, accompanied by an icebreaker and two tugboats, arrived at a specially constructed wharf at Pevek after an 18-day, 9,000 km journey from its original base in Murmansk, where fuel was loaded into the reactors.
Rosenergoatom said the facility will be used to replace capacity lost when the Bilibino nuclear station is permanently shut down at the beginning of the next decade.
Bilibino – the smallest and the northernmost operating nuclear power station in the world – has three commercial EGP-6 graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor units of 11 MW (net) each. They came online in 1975, 1976 and 1977. An identical unit, Bilibino-1, was permanently shut down in January 2019.
It is also planned to use the Akademik Lomonosov to power the Chaun-Bilibin mining complex in Chukotka, which includes gold mines, and to supply electricity to offshore oil rigs in Russia's Arctic.
In June Russian nuclear regulator Rostekhnadzor issued a 10-year licence to Rosenergoatom to operate the Akademik Lomonosov until 2029.
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.
