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42416 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 15:09:57
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
URL: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/russia-launches-floating-nuclear-power-plant-akademik-lomonosov-190822145809353.html |
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Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov Critics say any problem with the reactor in the remote region would be difficult to properly contain.
A huge vessel, the world's only floating nuclear power plant, has left its dock in the Russian port of Murmansk and is on its way to the arctic town of Pevek despite opposition from environmental groups.
The 144 metres long and 30 metres wide vessel, named the Akademik Lomonosov after the 18th-century Russian scientist, houses two nuclear reactors. It will be towed 6,000 kilometres to the remote Siberian region of Chukotka, about 86 kilometres from the US state of Alaska, after leaving the port on Friday.
Once docked, the 21,000-tonne barge will replace a coal-burning power plant and an ageing land-based nuclear plant and will supply 50,000 people in the area with electricity, according to Russia's state nuclear corporation Rosatom.
The floating vessel will be the northernmost nuclear plant in the world, and will also power the extraction of natural resources in the region when it starts operations next year.
Russia's state corporation has described the vessel as a "pilot project", with plans for widespread development and use of similar designs.
Russia, the United States and several other countries have long used nuclear reactors to power sea vessels, including ice breakers and submarines, but the Russian vessel is set to be the only floating nuclear power plant of its kind when it begins operations next year.
Scientists in China and researchers at the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are also working on sea-based nuclear power plants, and France has explored the possibility.
Russia floating power plant The floating nuclear power plant was towed from St Petersburg to Murmansk in May, where it was filled with nuclear fuel [File: Anton Vaganov/Reuters]
The environmental group Greenpeace has called the plan "Chernobyl on Ice", referring to the 1986 nuclear power plant meltdown, which released large levels of radiation into the atmosphere, forced thousands to flee their homes and sparked long-term fears of health and environmental repercussions.
An explosion on August 8 in Archangelsk has further heightened concerns of Russian nuclear negligence, with the government initially denying, and then admitting that radioactive material had been involved in the blast, which killed five scientists and caused radiation levels to spike in a nearby town.
The launch is part of a wider ambition of Russian President Vladimir Putin to develop the Northern Arctic region. That desire has become more realistic in recent years with global warming and melting ice caps making some areas more accessible.
What is the Akademik Lomonosov? Rosatom said the Akademik Lomonosov is part of a larger plan to provide energy to remote regions in Russia and around the world.
It said that floating nuclear units could be particularly beneficial to island nations and can be used to power desalination plants for countries with a shortage of fresh water.
The company has also said that, because many remote areas rely on coal-burning plants, the portable nuclear plants will help to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
On board the Akademik Lomonosov are two KLT-40C reactor systems, each with a capacity of 35 megawatts. It has an overall "life cycle" of 40 years, which may be extended to 50 years, according to Rosatom.
The corporation's Director General Alexei Likhachev, in May, described the vessel as an "unparalleled piece of engineering".
Rostom is currently working on a smaller, more powerful version of the floating plant, which it plans to roll out as part of the initiative's second generation.
Concerns of disaster Greenpeace has continually criticised the decade-long project, accusing the Russian corporation of not being transparent and saying that any problem with the reactor in the remote region would be difficult to properly contain before it turned catastrophic.
Rosatom has said the risks will be minimised, with spent fuel taken to special storage facilities in mainland Russia.
In 2017, Greenpeace protested at the St Petersburg Baltic shipyard, where the Akademik Lomonosov was being constructed and where tests were meant to take place. Those tests were moved to the smaller city of Murmansk in May, where the floating plant was loaded with nuclear fuel before its final departure.
In May, Jan Haverkamp, the nuclear expert with Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, said in a statement that installing the floating power plant in "the harsh environment of the Russian Arctic will pose a constant threat to people of the North and the pristine Arctic nature".
That month, Greenpeace, along with two Russian environmental organisations, sent a letter to Rosatom and other authorities that called for a peer-review of the vessel by nuclear regulators from other Arctic countries, as well as an Arctic Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).
In June, the Russian regulator Rostechnadzor issued a 10-year licence for the Akademik Lomonosov.
floating Russia power plant Critics fear a disaster would be hard to contain in the remote region of Chukotka, where the floating nuclear plant will be docked [Maxim Shemetov/Reuters] Critics have pointed to past incidents involving nuclear sea vessels, including the sinking of the gargantuan Kursk Submarine in 2000 and the leaking of radiation by a Russian icebreaker off the coast of Siberia in 2011.
Several fires onboard nuclear-powered vessels in recent years, including one in July that killed 14 crew members on the Losharik deep-sea vessel, have also stoked concerns.
"The incident-ridden history of Russian nuclear icebreakers and submarines shows the need for strict, independent oversight with international peer review. This must start now, before the reactors are loaded, and span the plant's entire risky operation - including transport, decommissioning and waste management," said Haverkamp.
Rosatom has called Greenpeace's concerns "baseless".
Future of nuclear power Michael Golay, a professor in the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Al Jazeera there is a great potential for innovation when it comes to nuclear plants based on water.
In some instances, the right designs could make these power plants safer than those on land, he said, noting that recent nuclear catastrophes had been caused not by the nuclear chain reaction, but by failures in cooling the nuclear reactor afterwards.
"What we've seen is, we can control the chain reaction pretty reliably," Golay said. "But the problem of reactor cooling has been important in the Fukushima accident and the Three Mile Island accident."
An innovative design that uses gravity and ocean water could make that cooling more foolproof, he added.
Golay said that the Akademik Lomonosov appears to use technology more akin to that used in land-based nuclear plants or nuclear-powered sea vessels.
This means its safety will rely more on the hardware, culture, training and execution by the crew.
The plant is also very small relative to commercial land-based nuclear plants. It would have to be scaled up to seriously affect the way nuclear power is delivered around the world.
"The [Akademik Lomonosov] is the first step in a long journey," Golay said. "But if it goes successfully, it could open the way to other possibilities."
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[42423] [42418] [42424] [42426] [42428] [42419] [42420] [42417] [42422] [42434] [42435] [42425] [42427] |
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42423 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 16:08:53
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
URL: http://earthboppin.net/talkshop/theend/messages/73645.html |
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Sorry everyone this is a repost...But the thing about this article is I feel I was supposed to see and an my bad for reposting a similar article on a different day.... as in today the day it this nuclear ship launched ...the image of this ship and the colors reminds me of my Putin dreams, especially the third one which is at link provided. It just brings a deeper sense of sorrow this contraption I am quite sure that Chernobyl along with living in NJ on top of a radon basement contributed to my thyroid issues which began during that time.
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42418 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 15:22:26
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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[42424] [42426] [42428] [42419] [42420] |
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42424 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 16:11:10
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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It's like an accident waiting to happen on purpose the Chernobyl plant incident just keeps on spreading dead nuked seedlings.
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[42426] [42428] |
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42426 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 16:22:41
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
URL: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/flies/context/historical/lord-of-the-flies-and-the-atomic-age/ |
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Okay after I sent this a really strange thing happened and a fly flew in front of my computer and I never had a fly in this house before that I recall..."Lord of the Flies" stuff resonates...I have had gnats in this residence but never a fly. It's bizarre how after I sent the prior message it just showed up...or maybe not all that strange...spirits testifying. Yeah think it was meant for me to repost this myself not realizing it had been posted previously.
......🔥......
Lord of the Flies and the Atomic Age
Writing in an era following the Second World War known as the ‘atomic age,’ Golding tapped into a widespread cultural panic over nuclear destruction and man’s capacity for warfare in Lord of the Flies. After the first atomic bombs were detonated over Japan at the end of the war in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began building their nuclear arsenals, leading many people to fear apocalyptic nuclear conflict. People built bomb shelters, students practiced nuclear bomb protection drills in American classrooms, and the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in a policy of brinksmanship that would come to be known as the Cold War. By placing his novel after a presumably nuclear attack, Golding asked questions that were common for the time period: How will human beings behave if society is destroyed? Are the worlds’ great empires capable of mutual destruction? And maybe most importantly, is human nature intrinsically self- destructive, or does it have the moral capability to act in the interest of the greater good? Golding used the allegory of boys stranded on an island to explore the kind of all-too-human drive for violence and domination that lead to nuclear acquisition in the first place.
As a member of the British Navy during the Second World War, Golding had been the captain of a ship that assisted in the invasion at Normandy, or D-Day, when the allies invaded Nazi occupied France, and this experience directly informed his view of man’s capacity for cruelty. Golding wrote “before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man.... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another...” Following the war, Golding worked as a headmaster at a boys’ school, which influenced his writing as well. By setting his story among schoolboys, rather than grown men fighting an actual war, he made his themes of brutality and the breakdown of civilization innate and inevitable. He intended his novel to be a direct warning about the specific dangers of nuclear proliferation, but his editor at Faber and Faber, Charles Monteith, edited out a lengthy beginning describing a nuclear war that sets the plot in motion, leaving the sense of global apocalypse, and the boys’ swift and inexorable descent toward the warfare that landed them on the island.
Golding does not just critique the inherent dangers of unchecked nuclear armament in his book, but also criticizes the totalitarian regimes rising up in the East. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was ascendant, and Western countries began learning about Soviet gulags for political dissenters, their violent political purges, and the breadth of the Soviet government’s domestic power. At the same time, awareness grew of the holocaust in Nazi Germany and the fascist regime that perpetrated it. When Jack ties up dissenters and beats them, or Roger delights in terrorizing boys into submission, Golding creates parallels to the use of force to establish a brutal, repressive system of authority. Golding was particularly interested in “groupthink,” a term coined by George Orwell in 1984 to describe how essentially good people are able, through coercion and fear, to excuse or enable injustice. Jack’s reign of terror resembles Hitler’s violent repression of political dissent, or Stalin’s bloody political purges of the 1930’s. While the concerns of the novel are timeless, it would have held particular resonance for readers just recovering from global conflict, and anxious about the fate of the world in the face of fascism, totalitarianism, and increasing nuclear threat.
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[42428] |
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42428 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 17:05:58
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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Now the fly is gone.....fly buzzed around for 20 minutes or so in front of my face and around the computer screen in front and back of after the post I made about nuclear seedlings of Chernobyl and now fly seems to have evaporated to another dimension.
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42419 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 15:35:58
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
URL: http://earthboppin.net/talkshop/international/messages/42411.html |
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http://earthboppin.net/talkshop/international/messages/42411.html
Date: August 22, 2019 at 23:03:49 From: pamela Subject: Crazy Chit, Russia Launches Floating Nuke in Arctic URL: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-launches-floating-nuclear-reactor-in-arctic-despite-warnings/ar-AAGc7EO?ocid=spartandhp
Russia launches floating nuclear reactor in Arctic despite warnings (with their track record-what could go wrong?!) see link
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[42420] |
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42420 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 15:44:32
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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42417 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 15:15:52
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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Yes, reported this about 4 posts below. Crazy Chit.
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[42422] [42434] [42435] [42425] [42427] |
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42422 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 16:03:48
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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Thanks... Again...so sorry I missed it...my apologies and etc. Had a funeral on my mind today, my moms.
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42434 |
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Date: August 24, 2019 at 13:38:40
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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no problem Evie. Sympathy for your Mom's passing.
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42435 |
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Date: August 24, 2019 at 14:06:51
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 16:18:39
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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my condolences for you loss, Eve.
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42427 |
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Date: August 23, 2019 at 16:23:10
From: Eve, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Russia launches floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov |
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Thank you Redhart. I just feel so sad today.
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