Norway eyes 200-250 MW floating nuclear reactors to power industry | Hacker News Reader

Norway eyes 200-250 MW floating nuclear reactors to power industry

interestingengineering.com

12 pointsPaulHoule14 comments

North of Norway has ~5 euro/MWh power most of the year https://euenergy.live/country.php?a2=NO3 , nuclear cant beat that.

> The floating plants are expected to supply electricity to nearby offshore platforms and feed power into the onshore grid.

Norwegian offshore platforms means it's related to fossil oil/gas extraction.

Indeed. There was a big push towards electrifying the offshore platforms and refineries using green hydro power. This was so our carbon budget didn't look so bad, as the actual end products are not counted.

However in recent years there's been strong pushback as people realized just how much power these platforms and refineries take, and what plugging them into our grid would do to electricity prices.

So this seems to be aimed at having your cake and eating it. We get "green" oil and gas, and no astronomical electricity prices.

In some relevant ways: Norway is Saudi Arabia but with a world class PR company. (I do wonder which one they use.)

Norway has had two small experimental nuclear reactors since the 50s or so, and they're getting decommissioned. Turns out that's expensive. Very expensive. Current estimates have ballooned to 56 billion NOK ($5.6b).

So what does SMR decommissioning look like?

At least this project has skipped the huge NIMBY issue by putting them on ships. And if anything goes wrong I'm sure nobody would mind glow-in-the-dark sushi...

Decommissioning isn’t usually as bad as building reactors — it’s not unusual for decommissioning projects to come in under budget and early.

What makes is it so expensive?

Small reactors miss out economies of scale that large reactors get access to. Halving the size of a pipe doesn’t halve the cost.

In the case of our experimental reactors, a large part as I understand it is that they were fooling around in the 60s. Thus a lot of "meh just put it over there" scenarios and such, without much consideration of the consequences.

Another point is that Norway has no way to process the leftover materials, and currently nowhere to store the processed materials.

So we need to ship the highly radioactive stuff abroad, and build a storage facility for when it's processed.

Russia built a floating reactor recently too. I wonder if it is too much of a risk though. Polluting fishing waters doesn’t sound good.

There are hundreds of nuclear reactors sailing around our oceans in ships and submarines and have been doing so for more than 70 years. Most estimates are above 400 total reactors though the actual count isn't really known since nearly all of these are military vessels.

Operating since 2019/2020:

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

It's in the far north, I'm not sure how much fishing is going on around there, or how a potential radiological leak would spread around.

It looks like each of its two reactors are a good bit more powerful than what is in an Ohio Class Submarine, but far less than what's in a Gerald R Ford class Aircraft carrier. For whatever thats worth

How safe are these reactors in the war that is coming?

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