# Rosatom Floating Nuclear Plant

By Yan Kurniawan

Topic: Energy

[Open the interactive Jig](https://ask.jig.com/j/7C0jBlqPTaUw)

## Guide

### 1. A power plant that floats

This long white barge is the Akademik Lomonosov, a nuclear power plant built on water\. It is moored at Pevek, a small Arctic town in the far north\-east of Russia\. Drag anywhere to look around it\.

It is 144 metres long and 30 metres wide, about the length of one and a half football pitches\.

### 2. Towed to the top of the world

The plant has no engines and cannot sail by itself\. It was built in a shipyard in St Petersburg and towed via Murmansk along Russia's Arctic coast\. Tugboats nudged it into its berth at Pevek in September 2019\.

That makes it the world's northernmost nuclear power plant\.

### 3. Two small reactors inside

Let's cut the hull open\. Near the middle sit two reactors, each sealed inside a thick steel vessel\. Further back are the machines that turn their heat into electricity\.

This inside view is simplified: the real rooms are more crowded and heavily shielded\.

### 4. Splitting atoms makes heat

Inside each reactor, uranium atoms split apart and release heat\. This is called fission\. Control rods soak up the tiny particles that keep it going, so lowering them slows the reaction down\. Try it\.

Each reactor makes 150 megawatts of heat\. The fuel lasts about three years before refuelling\.

### 5. Two separate water loops

Hot water from the reactor flows in a sealed loop through four steam generators\. There it boils water in a second, separate loop into steam\. The reactor's own water never leaves its room\.

The first loop is kept under high pressure, so it stays liquid even when it is much hotter than boiling\.

### 6. Steam spins the turbines

The steam rushes through a turbine, a shaft lined with rings of blades, and spins it fast\. The turbine turns a generator that makes electricity\. Cold seawater then cools the steam back into water for another trip\.

Together the two turbine generators can make about 70 megawatts of electricity\.

### 7. Power and heat for a town

A cable carries electricity ashore to a substation and on into the local grid\. A pipe carries heat to warm homes in Pevek through the long polar winter\. Choose which delivery to follow\.

The plant supplies about 60 percent of the region's energy\.

### 8. Refuel, return, repeat

Every few years the reactors get fresh fuel, one at a time, so the other can keep running\. After about twelve years the whole plant is towed home for servicing, then back to work\.

A floating plant can bring power to coasts with no roads and no big power lines\.