The keel of Akademik Lomonosov was laid on 15 April 2007. Construction started at the Sevmash Submarine-Building Plant in Severodvinsk. It cost 6 billion rubles. The celebrations were attended by the first deputy prime minister of Russia, Sergei Ivanov, and by the head of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko. Originally, Akademik Lomonosov was supposed to supply power to Severodvinsk town and Sevmash itself. However, in August 2008, the Russian government approved the transfer of work from Sevmash to the Baltic Shipyard in Saint Petersburg. The first reactor was delivered in May and the second one in August 2009. Akademik Lomonosov was launched on 30 June 2010. Akademik Lomonosov is deployed at Pevek, in the Chukotka region in Russia's Far East. It was expected to be delivered in 2019, and was planned to come online as the nearby Bilibino Nuclear Power Plant is shut down. On 28 April 2018, it left St. Petersburg under tow for Murmansk, where it received nuclear fuelfor the first time. On 17 May 2018, it arrived at Murmansk. The Akademik Lomonosovpower station was officially handed over to the Russian state nuclear power company on 4 July 2019. The towing operation began on 23 August 2019. On 9 September 2019, it arrived at its permanent location in the Chukotka region. It started operation on 19 December 2019. On 22 May 2020 the plant has been fully commissioned, by that date it had delivered 47.3 GWh zero-emissionselectric energy, covering 20% of demand in the region.
Description
Akademik Lomonosov has a length of and width of. It has a displacement of 21,500 tonnes and a crew of 69 people. For the power generation, it has two modified KLT-40naval propulsion reactors together providing up to 70 MW of electricity or 300 MW of heat. Reactors were designed by OKBM Afrikantov and assembled by Nizhniy Novgorod Research and Development Institute Atomenergoproekt. The reactor vessels were produced by Izhorskiye Zavody. The turbo-generators were supplied by Kaluga Turbine Plant. It is the world’s northernmost nuclear power plant.
Criticism
Akademik Lomonosov has come under criticism from environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the Bellona Foundation. The Bellona Foundation had written an entire report of its criticism of the floating nuclear power plant. Greenpeace criticized the project as one that may cause harm to a "fragile environment which is already under enormous pressure from climate change", referring to the project using terms such as "nuclear Titanic" and "Chernobyl on Ice". Rosatom explained in response that the PWR reactor technology used in the power plant has nothing in common with the old RBMK reactor design in Chernobyl and is designed to shut down automatically without external power and human intervention in case of emergency. The design incorporates all the state-of-the-art safeguards as documented in IAEA INSAG-3 recommendation and Russian civilian reactors had not a single accident leading to a radioactive leak in 34 years. Akademik Lomonosov is not the first marine vessel with nuclear reactors, with nuclear marine propulsion used by many military and civilian vessels since the 1950s.
