Russia Builds World's Largest Nuclear Powered Ice-Breaker 153
Hugh Pickens writes "Eve Conant reports that Russia's dream to dominate the Arctic will soon get a boost with a $1.1 billion nuclear-powered icebreaker 170 meters long and 34 meters wide. It's designed to navigate both shallow rivers and the freezing depths of the Northern Sea. Powered by two 'RITM-200' compact pressurized water reactors generating 60MWe, the world's largest 'universal' nuclear icebreaker is designed to blast through ice more than 4 meters thick and tow tankers of up to 70,000 tons displacement through Arctic ice fields. Why the effort and cost? 'Climate change is a pivotal factor in accelerating Russia's interest in icebreakers,' says Charles Ebinger. 'With climate change we are seeing a major change in the Northern Sea Route, which is a transport route along Russia's northern coast from Europe to Asia. Just in the last few years, with less and less permanent sea ice, maritime traffic across the Russian Arctic has risen exponentially.' The expectation is that the melt will continue, but there are still sections of route that would require icebreakers to keep it open year round. Icebreakers are an excellent example of a special purpose vehicle that is very poorly designed for operation outside its specific envelope. The key element is the rounded bow, a shape best suited to riding up on ice shelves and crushing them from above, causing the ships to roll from side to side in the waves when sailing on open water, making for a very seasick ride for the crew. Russia is the only country in the world currently building nuclear icebreakers, and has a fleet of about half a dozen in operation, along with a larger fleet of less powerful, diesel-powered icebreakers. The U.S. has been relying on a Russian diesel icebreaker to deliver supplies to Antarctica due to our own shrinking fleet of the cold-water, diesel-fueled vessels."
Re:A better way? (Score:5, Insightful)
A nuclear-powered ship should have raw power and heat in abundance. I'm thinking that super-hot steam under extreme pressure would cause any thickness of ice to crack
The crew doesn't care. People that work under those conditions are entirely acclimated to rolling seas.
Ice breakers are simple, stupid devices. Adding huge super heated pressurized ice blasters to something that must operate a billion miles from any sort of repair facility is just silly. Strong, redundant, protected engines combined with a ludicrously thick hull is optimal.
Sometimes the weather gets so bad the crew must retreat to quarters for days. When they emerge there is a meter or more of solid ice encasing everything. The mass of it increases the draft so much a ship can become unstable and the crew must remove it symmetrically to remain level.
There is no place for the sort of equipment necessary for controlling super-hot steam under extreme pressure on the deck or bow of an ice breaker. The ice would just mangle it beyond all fucking hope.
Making a lemonade (Score:2, Insightful)
Tested and works (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time to close the icebreaker gap (Score:5, Insightful)
We've got to close the icebreaker gap!
I know you say this in jest, and it's fine that Russians have this market, but there's also the aspect that the US wouldn't allow industry to build such a vessel, in this period of societal decline.
As it is, our Coast Guard only has 3 breakers, all diesel, and one is really supposed to be a research vessel. We have to buy help from the Russians just to run our government programs.
And forget about private industry being 'allowed' to build a twin-nuclear-powered massive ice break. It would be tied up in red tape and lawsuits until the investors left.
There was a day when the US would have been outmaneuvering all the other industrial nations in advancing new technology like this. The air supply has been choked off in America but the brain hasn't quite gone hypoxic yet.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
When the harvests fail, you can be the test subject to see how well you can adapt to no food.
Right now they're predicting that huge amounts of land would become economical to farm on in Canada and Siberia and such, far more than what will be lost by rising sea levels. A few degrees can mean weeks more growing season in areas like North Dakota, allowing the the planting of more productive plants that need that time to mature.
Odd allocation of blame above (Score:4, Insightful)
It may be nice to pretend that you don't need the support of a large organisation (eg. a Navy) to run large projects (eg. a huge nuclear powered icebreaker) that cost a lot of money for little or no financial return - however that act of pretending is known as fantasy. You fantasy is somewhat offensive in blaming governments for stopping the mythical creature of some libertarian building a nuclear icebreaker in his garage in Idaho. If it wasn't for that darned red tape and their dog he could do it! Scale that up to a fucking huge oil company and they've still got better ways to spend their money than building nuclear icebreakers. Private enterprise is just not going to do it - it's the sort of infrastructure that's applied at a national level (Russia) and borrowed on an international level.