The Nuclear Power Plant of the Future May Be Floating Near Russia | Hacker News Reader

The Nuclear Power Plant of the Future May Be Floating Near Russia

nytimes.com

96 pointstysonzni115 comments

I took a broader look at Russia's nuclear power program here - https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/08/02/the-world-relies...

You're the Economist author?

A point you might well have included is the topic (and perhaps, questions over authorship) of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin's PhD thesis: "Mineral and Raw Materials Resources And the Development Strategy for the Russian Economy".

https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/08/putin...

I particularly enjoyed the Atoms For Peace subtitle, the name of one of Thom Yorke’s side projects.

it's a reference to Eisenhower's famous 1953 speech

It seems unfortunate that there are no author names on the Economist articles. One's work deserves recognition.

Russia is conducting an experiment with nuclear power, one that backers say is a leading-edge feat of engineering but that critics call reckless.

The country is unveiling a floating nuclear power plant.

Um, "unveiling" ??

We've have floating nuclear power in submarines, aircraft carriers, maybe other vessels for half a century.

Yes, the article notes that, "The United States used a barge-based reactor to generate electricity for the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 until 1976, and Westinghouse, the American reactor builder, planned — but never built — two floating plants off the New Jersey coast at around that time"

1968! The interesting story is why the NYT's is running this and running with it now [not trying to be tin-hat, maybe it was just a slow news day, but you can find links posted on HN going back almost 5 years about this project]

I dream of a time when there is a slow news day so they publish less content. Also dream of a day when you turn on a new station and breaking news is in fact breaking news.

When I lived in Norway, this was pretty much the norm. They would publish gossip about celebrities and politicians all day instead.

This is designed to just generate power rather than to use it to power itself.

Companies 'unveil' new cars every year, just because the basis has been done before does mean that you can't unveil it in a different format.

It's a good idea. Afaik, naval nuclear power has a pretty good track record.

Who knows if that will continue for commercial power generation?

But at least it solves the stupid "perpetual one-off design" space nuclear power seems to have been stuck in. (Although I believe I read that at least France standardized all their reactor buildings?)

American naval nuclear power has an excellent record. Russian, not so much. Skimming this list, I’m inclined to use the word “horrendous”: http://spb.org.ru/bellona/ehome/russia/nfl/nfl8.htm#O5

Why not go one step further and make it fully submerged off the coast, to protect it from a bad weather?

I mean, this is pretty much just running an extension cord to a nuclear sub. Why not?

Because there is zero market for it especially after Fukushima. It was tried by the recently privatised French military shipyards as a way to diversify (that's the Flexblue project mentioned in the article) and just couldn't be sold.

Its a shame IMO. There are lots of problems with nuclear power, but at least the problems are ones that make sense to humans. It seems like nuclear waste would be easier to handle than a ruined atmosphere.

Its cheaper to build a ship than a sub. Besides, the reactor would have to be close enough to the shore to run a power line etc. Unlikely to be affected by bad weather.

From the article:

> A French company has designed a reactor called Flexblue that would not float but rather be submerged on the ocean floor.

Thanks, missed that part somehow.

During a power crisis caused by a high tension cable breakdown Auckland depended on ship borne power. I'm pretty sure it was GE gas turbines. There is a well understood model for mobile power, I don't see why this model can't work and guy lots of use cases. Nuclear why not?

The loss of competence in nuclear engineering worldwide worries me. Do we need to start sending engineering grads to Brazil? Britain outsourced it's coming plants to China didn't it?

That's a lot of ship, plant, and staff for just 70MW. The Ford class of aircraft carriers generates about 700MW.

It's 2 x 70 MWe or about 300 MWt. A4W reactors on Nimitz class aircraft carriers produce about 2 x 550 MWt which translates to about 100 MWe and 2 x 104 MW shaft power for propulsion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4W_reactor

Its worth mentioning that new turbines for generating electricity are in development with higher output compared to the steam powered turbines. This will basically increase the electrical output of the nuclear plant with the same amount of fuel which will make NPPs even more viable in the future

The nuclear power plant of the future can be found in a science museum. All dangers of a catastrophic accident aside, nuclear energy has become economically infeasible. Just recently, half-build powerplants have been abandoned in the US for pure financial reasons, and the other projects under constructions face severe cost problems too. And this is not counting for the still unsolved problem of disposing the nuclear waste. Meanwhile, solar and wind have become much cheaper than nuclear, and counting in the construction costs for new clean plants, even coal.

The idea of putting a nuclear power plant on a float is faszinating. It solves cooling, allows relocation of the power plant and in the case of disaster, it can be dumped into the ocean, which is somewhat better than contaminating occupied land, but still isn't acceptable.

Unless there is some significant breakthrough in operating costs and safety as well as a solution for the nuclear waste, nuclear isn't the future.

> unsolved problem of disposing the nuclear waste

I'm not sure what you mean by unsolved disposal. Nuclear waste from power plants is stored in secure facilities. It takes up a manageable amount of space, is low maintanance and isn't dangerous. Furthermore, future reactors will be able to reuse it; the current reactors only use up a small fraction of the fuel. So actually, you wouldn't even want to throw it away.

Also, nuclear fuel is advantageous logistically. A typical plant needs 1 train-load of fuel a year. That's a relatively small freight, you can ship that from anywhere around the world. On the other hand, for carbon-fuel powerplants, you need a train load of fuel per day.

I'd love to see the planet off non-renewable-fuels, but a big hurdle is that, unless we figure out storage, the renewable energy sources have to be supplemented with something for when it's night and there's no wind. I don't see a better option for that something than nuclear. Of course, an alternative would be for society to switch to an energy usage scheme that doesn't presume that power is uninterruptable. However, that would require profound changes to our everyday lives, and I don't think we're quite mature enough as a species to go through with something like that at scale.

Future reactors? Rosatom has 800 MW breeders now!

It has one 800 MW breeder that has been operating at full power for two years. Plans to build more of them in China appear to have been shelved. The successor BN-1200 implementation has also been suspended. The 6 reactors that Russia currently has under construction are all PWRs. I think that referring to breeders as future reactors (in the context of commercial power plants) is appropriate.

But it’s not like it’s a brand new design just out of prototyping. It’s a continuation of a 350 MW unit that ran for decades and provided drinking water.

Point is the Russians have breeder technology fairly well figured out.

The BN-800 is certainly better proven than other breeder designs, which are either much smaller or operate only in PowerPoint slides. Can it or something like it be built at prices to make breeder power reactors commercially mainstream? That's still unknown. Commercial viability is the biggest unknown for every new power reactor design.

What do you mean by "secure facilities"? Yes, currently the nuclear waste is in intermediate storage facilities. Which are buildings, with an useful life time of 50 years. Unless a nuclear technology for reusing or processing the waste appears, we are talking about safe storage for thousands of years.

I don't think nuclear waste is as big a problem as you might think it is: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

And on a side note, are solar and aeolic scalable enough to support (let's say) the entire US ?

How much of the country would physically need to be covered for that? Cause I've seen claims that it's just impossible

Nuclear waste won't kill anyone, as long as it is contained in the storage containers. We just don't have found a way to keep it guaranteed safe for centuries.

Solar alone could easily power the country. Covering large parts of Arizona would produce enough energy to power the whole world. Powering the US, especially distributing it across the states, makes that an easy job. And of course, there is wind. Probably it would be enough to cover all rooftops to power any state.

On Sunny days, Germany can power 30% of the grid by solar only, and that is in a country which is less suitable for solar than any place in the US except Oregon.

regarding the xkcd, it's not really accurate (it seems to consider only the neutrons as "radiation"), for a somewhat better description see the first answer at

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/187605/does-wate...

The cartoon only argues that the material is safe to swim next to in a pool. It doesn't argue that storing spent fuel in a pool for hundreds of years is a good idea because of it (it isn't).

Highly active waste is stored to be separated from the biosphere 10k to 100k years (If stored in a pool that's 200 to 2000 pools assuming a 50 year lifespan and hoping there are no massive earthquakes to ruin that plan - and hoping people are still around to rebuild the pools).

The alternatives for storing includes the pool idea (however difficult), as well as storing in several km deep drill holes (downside not being able to move it again). The most realistic one is storing it in earthquake-safe bedrock at 500m depth, in large metal capsules embedded in clay or salt. Needless to say, even for a small amount of material, this is a rather expensive storage.

There’s lots of other hazardous waste which remains dangerous literally forever. Only needing safe storage for thousands of years is pretty good.

The spent fuel building on most all sites have a corrugated metal roll up door. It is, without a doubt, the most vulnerable area in the plant. Spent over 20 years as an Operations Plant Supervisor, licensed at CE PWR plants.

>in the case of disaster, it can be dumped into the ocean, which is somewhat better than contaminating occupied land, but still isn't acceptable.

dumping the stuff into ocean results in spreading the stuff around the world. It is much more preferable to keep it contained - like in case of Chernobyl's 30km exclusion zone at least we have a chance 100years from now when technology allows to clean up the zone - no such luck if it happens in the open ocean. Fukushima is still fighting to contain the stuff on site and don't let it get out to avoid making the disaster into a global one.

Most of the contaminated material in Fukushima, which isn't the molten core, has already escaped into the Pacific ocean. Which is not good for sure. Luckily, the Pacific ocean contains a lot of water. So the dilution is massive. Still, nothing I would consider acceptable.

>given the seeming importance of sobriety on such a vessel, have a drink at the bar.

if the journalists ever mentioned the "importance of sobriety on such a vessel" in the presence of the crew, i'm pretty sure it immediately became the next, right after "Za mirnyy atom!", popular drinking toast on that ship. "Nu! za osobuyu vazhnost trezvosti na yadernom reaktore." Amen.

These floating reactors aren't the future - you just don't want a potential Chernobyl delivered right to your city (just lookup the safety record of Russian nuclear submarines what these peaceful reactors are built after). These ships are a classic Russian solution (cheap, low tech simple/crude, without long-term thinking) to the typical Russian issue of lack of infrastructure at the time when climate change encourages and political situation pushes Russia to increase development in the North-East regions.

There isn’t a country on earth that would actually allow Russia to park an actual nuclear bomb off their coast. Even the ones aligned with Russia. Oh, how do you build a sarcophagus on a sunk nuclear reactor?

There is no need to build a sarcophagus around a sunken nuclear reactor. Water is a great radiation stopper, to the extend that you can actually build and operate an "open" reactor where you can look directly down to the core and see the blue glow from the Cherenkov radiation. It would probably be wise to fence it off somehow.

Perhaps like this one at Reed College in Portland?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLBcp3nJlFQ

Uhm, you don't, because water is absolutely fantastic at blocking radiation - just several meters of it would block literally all radiation from a reactor gone critical. Not to mention that nuclear reactors are not bombs, not any more than coal fired power plant boilers are bombs.

It doesn't prevent radioactive elements leaking into the water though.

> "Rosatom plans to serially produce such floating nuclear plants, and is exploring various business plans, including retaining ownership of the reactors while selling the electricity they generate."

No sane govt will allow a foreign power to literally be able to shutdown one of their cities on a whim.

I think what the Russian Govt realized is that instead of building nuclear power plants, its going to be more profitable to hold the electric grid of some country hostage, just like the hard profit they make holding Europe hostage with their gas pipelines.

EDIT:

There a lot more issues I have with their idea but that was the one most striking to me.

- How are going to supply electricity during a hurricane ? Most cites are located on the path to some hurricane / cyclone / tornado.

- Coastlines near cities are expensive real estate (not to mention anyone with property there allowing a literal power nuclear plant blocking their view ) - it takes important real estate from ports that are much more useful for docking ships, etc. Its possible to build a separate port far away from the city; but then you have to pay the extra cost of building some extra infrastructure to deal with the ship, at that point its just easier to build your own power plant.

- "Rosatom, in a statement, insisted its plant was 'invulnerable to tsunamis.'"

Really ?? why are they trying to sell dumb electricity when they have the much more valuable technology of invincible ships. How many tsunamis has one of their ships survived exactly ?

No sane govt will allow a foreign power to literally be able to shutdown one of their cities on a whim.

Western Europe is already critically dependent on Russian gas pipelines, so this would be no biggie. Russia needs the foreign currency desperately so it won’t act lightly.

Western Europe is well aware of this fact this is why they are desperate to get the pipeline from Qatar built - which is not going anywhere because of destabilization in Syria (The pipeline needs to pass through Syria). Hmm.. I wonder which foreign power is helping prop up the Assad Regime

Also Germany is building HVDC lines from solar power plants is Spain. Depending on Russia has already got us in the mess where Europe is unable to hold them accountable for a lot of crimes they have committed on European soil.

Because Assad was going to let a Qatar pipeline go through Syria in the first place? Hmm I wonder which foreign powers destabilized Syria and have been trying to overthrow the current government for close to 7 years now.

" On 1 June 2012, President Assad vowed to crush the anti-government uprising. On 12 June 2012, the UN for the first time officially proclaimed Syria to be in a state of civil war. " - Wikipedia

I am sorry but the conspiracy Theory that the US had anything to do with starting the Syrian conflict is simply not true.

> I am sorry but the conspiracy Theory that the US had anything to do with starting the Syrian conflict is simply not true.

The US had a lot do with it, but by (among other things) bungling the occupation of Iraq, not by any deliberate policy.

I didn't mention US in my post, but since you insist... here is what is declassified and publicly known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore

I do not see anything wrong with providing weapons to people who are being literally slaughtered by their own govt.

There is no evidence that any foreign govt helped cause the Syrian Civil War in the first place.

You first said that the Qatar pipeline is not going anywhere because of destabilization in Syria... I guess you should've been honest from the beginning and said that it's not going anywhere because the project to remove Assad from power has failed.

You started this flamewar, took it into increasingly off topic politics, and (elsewhere) attacked another user personally. None of this is ok on HN and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well the Australian government(s) aren't sane then. We've been privatizing our power plants for decades, and iirc some owned by Government owned Chinese enterprises.

EDIT: For what it's worth. I don't have a problem with foreign ownership of the powerplants. But I do have a problem with privatization in a market without much competition.

ownership is different from actually having ops capabilities,

I do not think there is a button somewhere is Beijing that China can use to just turn off Australian power plant on Australian soil.

The most China can do to sell the asset and temporary depress its price.

agreed

As a vector for inserting software viruses ownership is second to none.

The Australian market is routinely manipulated by pretending to turn off equipment until the price rises sufficiently to pretend to turn the equipment on just in time for the high price market.

So yes, there is "a button somewhere" that a private owner can use to just turn off Australian power plants on Australian soil.

That's interesting, the US has an almost entirely privatized energy generation market and doesn't routinely have that problem.

I've read a bit about Australia's energy problems over the years, I'm unaware of how they regulate pricing though. The US has very strict rules in place for its private utilities.

Private + tight controls has resulted in the US having close to the cheapest power in the developed world. Roughly 1/3 the cost of Germany's or Australia's electricity. Privatization doesn't explain Australia's numerous disastrous energy choices and policies.

Incorrect.

"Tapes Show Enron Arranged Plant Shutdown"

In the midst of the California energy troubles in early 2001, when power plants were under a federal order to deliver a full output of electricity, the Enron Corporation arranged to take a plant off-line on the same day that California was hit by rolling blackouts, according to audiotapes of company traders released here on Thursday.

The tapes and memorandums were made public by a small public utility north of Seattle that is fighting Enron over a power contract. They also showed that Enron, as early as 1998, was creating artificial energy shortages and running up prices in Canada in advance of California's larger experiment with deregulation....

https://outline.com/f2N42r (nytimes)

Also:

Enron defrauded California out of billions during energy ...

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/enro-m10.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

California's problems in the early 2000s were caused by exactly that. Here's one tape where a trader asks an operator to "get a little creative and find a reason to go down".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBnnUIEZiNI

I'm not sure if its really been fixed or if its just not as aggressive.

As others have said, ownership doesn’t precisely equal control, and certainly not in the way control can be exercised over one of these floating reactors. Also...

Well the Australian government(s) aren't sane then.

Yeah, hasn’t that been pretty well established in a myriad of other ways?

If that happened, the client government could nationalize the reactor and seize control of it. This would provoke a diplomatic incident, of course, but that'd be something for the two governments to sort out.

Or, less aggressively, they would retain enough reserve power generation capacity to replace the electricity. For example, have gas plants that can be spun up on demand if the nuclear reactors were shut off.

Either way, a government isn't going to be held ransom by Rosatom.

> "Or, less aggressively, they would retain enough reserve power generation capacity to replace the electricity. For example, have gas plants that can be spun up on demand if the nuclear reactors were shut off."

If your country has the capabilities to build reserve power plants why allow the Russians to get all the profit from the power market ? You could just spin up your gas plants indefinitely.

Nuclear power is also not cheap, and the main cost is associated with risk (disposing of waste, etc), I am sorry but if their is one area where you cant be cheap its nuclear power.

Also the countries that Russia seems to target are poor countries with weak governments like Sudan (not to mention Sudan's main cites are all far away from the coast). Most poor countries these days are located in perfect places for solar energy, which is anyway cheaper than nuclear.

>Nuclear power is also not cheap, and the main cost is associated with risk (disposing of waste, etc), I am sorry but if their is one area where you cant be cheap its nuclear power.

I see nuclear power as being just as susceptible to off-shoring the dirty parts as any other industry. Russia could just dump all the waste in a mine in Siberia and even if they did a terrible job it would be a century before anyone noticed. Until the waste containment becomes a problem this would be a win-win because the buyer can say they're buying environmentally friendly nuclear energy and the Russians can make money hand over fist.

> Most poor countries these days are located in perfect places for solar energy, which is anyway cheaper than nuclear.

Apples to oranges. Solar can't cover more than a fraction of the total energy because of it's fluctuating nature.

>How many tsunamis has one of their ships survived exactly

A tsunami in sufficiently deep water is basically imperceptible. It’s only a problem once the sea floor starts pushing the water up.

The ship wont be in deep water though but in the shoreline !

You are safe in either direction, either 15 km inland of 15+ km offshore.

A 15km underwater line is not a problem.

> "Rosatom, in a statement, insisted its plant was 'invulnerable to tsunamis.'"

> - Coastlines near cities are expensive real estate (not to mention anyone with property there allowing a literal power nuclear plant blocking their view ) - it takes important real estate from ports that are much more useful for docking ships, etc. Its possible to build a separate port far away from the city; but then you have to pay the extra cost of building some extra infrastructure to deal with the ship, at that point its just easier to build your own power plant.

Both of these are pretty easily solved by floating the plant a short distance off the shore and laying a power line along the sea floor. Tsunami's aren't an issue till right along the shore and the ship would practically disappear if it were just a bit off shore.

You are still leaving out storm surges etc. The ocean is a terrible place for infrastructure, its why we only do it if we really have no other option (offshore oil rigs etc).

Storm surge isn't a danger to a ship unless it's docked on shore or gets pushed ashore. It's really not that different from a tsunami in that regard a ship at sea just moves up with the bulk of the water.

Oh, ships sink in the middle of the ocean, I believe, with utmost certainty.

>No sane govt will allow a foreign power to literally be able to shutdown one of their cities on a whim.

Hasn't Gasprom done this [cut supply] in the past but continues to have customers in Europe? If it's cheap enough they will probably have customers.

After a long running dispute over theft of gas intended for western Europe, Gasprom cut off gas to Ukraine for 3 days in winter 2006 [1].

Note that Naftogaz (Ukraine gas organisation) later admitted to this theft, which was worth $3 billion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...

Please note, that no theft was admitted by Naftogaz (outside usual Russian circle of propaganda).

Off shore drilling rigs aren’t anchored to he floor, but the pipe could literally snap if the rig floats away.

They are kept in place solely by GPS and thrust vectoring.

The Ruskies are going to use the same technology here, known for decades, and probably safer than oil rigs since there nothing to snap and a small volume to protect if the whole thing sinks.

- Your account was created 8 minutes ago

- defending some press release coming out of Russia.

How is the weather today in Moscow ?

This breaks the HN guidelines by being (1) a personal attack, (2) nationalistic flamewar, and (3) insinuation of astroturfing without evidence. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> nothing to snap

There's still an electrical cable, but I would assume it's more durable than an underwater oil pipeline.

True, but consider:

When an electrical cable snaps little happens, a breaker trips and maybe a fish got fried (but not many).

When a pipeline snaps you get deep water horizon.

> - "Rosatom, in a statement, insisted its plant was 'invulnerable to tsunamis.'" > Really ?? why are they trying to sell dumb electricity when they have the much more valuable technology of invincible ships. How many tsunamis has one of their ships survived exactly ?

A 10' dinghy in deep water is pretty well invulnerable to tsunamis. Invulnerability to hurricanes would be an entirely different proposition.

In deep water. Not moored at the coast providing electricity.

It could be moored off shore similar to Offshore Wind Farms.

Also, these are small plants; not the amount of power that would cripple a country.

Make its e-supply more reliable, yes. But not replace the bulk of the supply. For that Rosatom will sell you a few GW units on land

"holding Europe hostage with their gas pipelines"

Only countries that can't or won't pay. Take Ukraine, all the gas destined for Germany and the Netherlands (people who have payed their bills on time since 1950) had to go through them. Russia couldn't shut down those Ukrainian deadbeats because then they would lose billions.

The world is not black or white.

Ukraine doesn't buy Russian gas for years. :-/

> No sane govt will allow a foreign power to literally be able to shutdown one of their cities on a whim.

Doesn’t Europe, and in particular Germany, already do this with Russian natural gas?

Clever way to distribute nuclear weapons capabilities?

No. Reactors don't fail or explode anything like atomic bombs. The only way this could house a nuclear weapon is by having a hidden missile silo somewhere in it and they already have nuclear missile subs for discreetly placing nuclear weapons close to their target.

An atomic bomb is not the only form a nuclear weapon. Reactor fuel (or related contaminated material) can be used to create a dirty bomb, which in some ways is more destructive. Not in the initial blast, but in rendering the contaminated area uninhabitable for decades or centuries.

Aren't dirty bombs considered a Hollywood trope, and not a weapon of any actual utility (except scaring people with the thought of it)? See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb.

dirty bombs can function as a denial of access ordinance... when isotopes or persistent toxin are scattered spattered over an area the cleanup is prohibitively expensive , we than have a kiev/chornobl scenario...were this to happen on wall street or silicon valley, it would be a major setback, or we would have to requantify the acceptable titre of radionucliides in a "occupiable" region

When you have 2000 nukes you don’t need dirty bombs for area denial the only ones who would be interested in dirty bombs would be non-state actors and those can’t build one and the few non-state actors that could are most part not stupid enough to build one because they actually want to keep what ever little regional power they have.

Also reactor fuel is a terrible material for a dirty bomb because of its long half life time, you need materials which are much more active than that to be effective like those used in radioactive medicine and sensors those isotopes and are much more controlled than processed nuclear fuel and for a good reason.

Things like "nuclear" and "floating near Russia" don't inspire confidence.

Can't believe somewhere in the world, someone is still harnessing nukes

Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

John McCarthy has an interesting website over nuclear energy [0]. I can't vouch for how actually true it is, but it seems reasonably well argued. This was his comment over nuclear waste:

> Q. What about nuclear waste?

> A. The waste consists of the fission products. They are highly radioactive at first, but the most radioactive isotopes decay the fastest. (That's what being most radioactive amounts to). About one cubic meter of waste per year is generated by a power plant. It needs to be kept away from people. After 10 years, the fission products are 1,000 times less radioactive, and after 500 years, the fission products will be less radioactive than the uranium ore they are originally derived from. The cubic meter estimate assumes reprocessing, unfortunately not being done in the U.S.

I'd always assumed 25,000 years for it to return to normal levels.

[0]: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html

I’m very pro-nuclear, we almost certainly need it while we improve renewables. However, 25,000 years or 500 years... it’s pretty much the same problem for us as a species. 500 years is significantly longer than the US has been a country, and represents a period of time measured in many many generations. 500 years of storage is a hard problem, and from the perspective of us, our kids, their kids, and their kids and a dozen generations after it might as well be a thousand, ten thousand, or 25,000 years. 500 years is longer than any of us will be alive and far longer than we can hope to predict the course of society and technology.

I agree, it's a bit ridiculous talking in these terms. Primarily I just want to have my facts reasonably straight if I'm going to have a debate.

Shakespeare was born approximately 500 years ago, Cambridge University was founded 800 years ago where as 25,000 years ago was in the depths of the last ice age (11,000) and Wooly mammoths still existed (4,000). I can visualise the first couple in my head, not the last two.

Given the fairly drastic things that are happening to the great barrier reef (50% loss in 2 years and it's about 6-8,000 years old [0]) I question more and more, how much of a risk nuclear is worth taking until solar and wind can take over.

> 500 years of storage is a hard problem, and from the perspective of us, our kids, their kids, and their kids and a dozen generations after

I agree, we're passing on another problem, but it is a solvable problem. Humans are capable of building structures that stay intact for more than 500 years. With climate change, there's so many factors involved we've no real idea if it is even solvable.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrier_Reef#Geology_and...

I couldn’t agree more, and moreover the odds of us giving the future something other than our waste probably depends to some extent on embracing nuclear power. If not, what we’re going to pass on might be light on radioactivity, but heavy on a ruined climate and mass extinctions. I grant that in a perfect world we wouldn’t burn coal or use nuclear power, but in this most imperfect world we need to stop using fossil fuels and ramp up nuclear to ease us into renewables over the next century.

Incorporate the fission products into a glass by boiling with nitric acid and melting with iron oxide and phosphoric acid. Cast the glass into large blocks, dump those into the deep sea. The radiation is shielded, heat is convected away, nothing dissolves, nobody gets hurt, evil terrorists couldn't retrieve the stuff if they tried with both hands. How is this difficult?

If we did this with plain spent fuel, the glass would contain plutonium, and the usual professional liars (Nader, Caldicott, ...) would claim that the plutonium and uranium would dissolve over millions of years and give everyone cancer. But with fission products and a time horizon of just 500 years, even that kind of nonsense doesn't have any impact anymore. (And we shouldn't trash plutonium. It's valuable!)

I am starting to get sick of environmentalists complaining, doing nothing to solve the issues their so "passionate" about, and then harassing / criticising any solution that gets proposed.

> Inside, the floating reactor is a warren of tight corridors, steep staircases, pipes, wires and warning signs in Cyrillic letters.

What? So Russians would have warning signs in English?

Indeed, the article overall sounds like anti-Russia propaganda. What's going on with the NY Times about Russia and China? Just grasping for clickbait?

Cyrillic is the writing system Russian uses, English is one of the many using the Latin system.

I'm not seeing an anti-Russian slant here. The criticism is tame for an article on nuclear power, and they'd likely have the same concerns if this was a US project.

OK, I wasn't clear enough. The language is darkly evocative, of sloppiness and danger. I mean, "warren of tight corridors". And "steep staircases", which are very typical for ships, by the way. And "pipes, wires", which again is pretty typical, even for your average trendy restaurant. And "Cyrillic letters"? I'm not sure what to make of that. It rather states the obvious.

>I'm not sure what to make of that

They're just trying to paint a picture for the reader.

That, we agree about.

Did you see the pictures? I'd say the description is accurate. The ship lacks the brightly-lit, clean, polished interior I would expect to see in a European, Asian, or American nuclear facility. It's kind of dingy looking to be blunt.

Sure, a claustrophobic architecture is not surprising for a ship, but most readers' experience of large boats--if any--is likely to be with cruise ships. Should the author have omitted a physical description of the ship's features because a reasonable reader could have guessed them? Personally, I appreciate these kinds of small details.

The article does flirt with open skepticism of the project, and I'm open to the possibility that this stance is unfair, but I don't think these atmospheric details cross any line when they seem quite apt looking at the accompanying pictures.

Also, I agree with the comment above that says the critical tone is unsurprising for an article on nuclear tech, domestic or foreign.

Have you spent much time in industrial facilities? Especially prototypes?

It still looks dingy even if dingy is usual. So from my perspective it seems like a description rather than a criticism. Not a necessary paragraph, but more likely included to justify the reporter's visit to the ship than some attack.

OK, fair enough. It's just that we've seen a lot of stuff here lately about China and Russia which is arguably propaganda.

The media has been full of anti-Russian propaganda lately, so I understand being suspicious. And this topic isn't essential news, so there likely is some interest that wants it written. I'd guess nuclear lobby given the "dingy but safe" take on the plant.

I don't think your example is anti-Russian—it's poor writing that's trying to be evocative and bring the reader into the scene. Obviously the writing would be in Cyrillic, but an amateur (or rushed) author would look to that detail to lend veracity or even exoticism when in fact it's just banal, as you rightly point out.

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