Russia's first ship-based nuclear power plant will set sail in late April from its St. Petersburg mooring on its way to Murmansk, a near-coastal port off of the Barents Sea, where it will be loaded with fuel, according to a report from Russian media outlet Tass.
This will put the Akademik Losmonosov plant in northwestern Russia. The KLT-40S reactor with a generation capacity of 70 MWe was designed for deployment in remote northern and northeastern outposts, industrial sites and oil platforms. After fuel loading in May the plant will undergo a series of tests. It will then be moved to the Arctic port of Pevek, Chukotka, off of the East Siberian Sea.The plant is slated to replace the power supply that will be lost with the closing of the Bilibino nuclear power plant, a four EGP-6 reactor plant that is noted as the smallest and most norther domestic nuclear power plant in the world. That plant is scheduled to close in 2019.
To put this into context, it more than twice the distance from Pevek to Moscow than it is from Pevek to Anchorage, Alaska.
The 3,700 mile journey to Pevek is expected to require support from icebreakers, according to Nuclear Engineering International News.
Operational tests on the floating nuclear power plant (FNPP) are expected to begin in September 2019.
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