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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2499 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 4, 2022

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I’ve recently become quite enamoured with the idea of offshore nuclear power, as laid out in this presentation.

The benefits seem quite numerous:

  • the possibility of mass producing standardised power stations at significantly reduced cost

  • export business model

  • reducing the risks posed by tsunamis and earthquakes

  • sidestepping the NIMBY problems that normally emerge with these kind of projects

Anyone here able to point out why this is likely to be a terribly stupid idea in practice?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov exists, and it's a vanity project. 70 megawatts of electricity is a pittance. A fossil fuel power plant in Kostroma produces 3600 megawatts. And caviar.

What is we tried to scale it up? The main building of Smolensk NPP (3000 MW) is about 650 metres long and 150 metres wide. Prelude FLNG is 488 by 74, three times smaller. So a 1000 MW plant is probably the biggest floating NPP we can build right now, even if we somehow ignore the whole problem of squeezing in a substation, which needs a lot of open space and won't like ocean spray at all.

I wouldn't necessarily say that it's a vanity project. The mobility is huge. Being able to float it to where it's needed and not have to ship in fossil fuels?

Shipping fossil fuels is a solved problem, especially if you need just 70MW. That's 90 thousand tonnes of coal, or 900 hoppers, or 18 smallish freight trains.

One advantage kinda minimizes the other, sadly; it's cheapest to ship fossil fuels to the same places a power barge can go. A combined cycle gas power barge that could refuel directly from an LNG carrier would have much higher power-to-displacement, be massively cheaper, and give more load-following capacity to 3rd world grids in brownout-prone places like South Africa and California. Nukes aren't great at that. (Edit: Karpowerships is doing exactly this in Dakar(?) now, but with natgas diesel conversions instead of turbines)

There's already some of those on the market by Siemens, iirc. Older power barges used big multi-fuel diesels.

On the other other hand, the low cost of gas turbines makes putting them ashore absolutely trivial. It takes a place as dysfunctional as Lebanon or Dominica to make a long term power barge lease a more viable alternative. And serving those places is risky, as Karpowership discovered with their Lebanon contract going unpaid.

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