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Our Arctic Neighbors: Greens rip nuclear power plans Russian plan for nuclear-powered offshore Arctic oil and gas projects critiqued by Bellona Foundation based on expense, risks Sarah Hurst For Petroleum News
Russia’s proposed use of nuclear power to assist oil and gas projects in the Arctic would multiply the risks and be economically unjustifiable, according to a report by a Norwegian environmental organization. The Bellona Foundation, which opposes all oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, calls such an application of nuclear energy “particularly irresponsible and reproachable.”
The Bellona report, titled “From Polar to Nuclear? ‘Nuclearification’ of the Russian offshore oil and gas industry,” by energy security expert Vladislav Larin, analyzes the history and current status of Russia’s plans to use nuclear-powered underwater drillships or floating nuclear power plants in the Arctic, which have been motivated by the enormous challenges of developing the country’s offshore resources.
“Nowhere in the world has drilling of an offshore oil or gas exploratory or production well yet been attempted in such a hostile environment as is found on the shelf of the Barents and Kara Seas,” the report says. “One area that could provide a slightly commensurate meteorological picture is the offshore deposit fields of the North Sea, but production in that region is spared the principle challenge: the enduring freeze-over of sea surface, with ice cover going several decimeters deep.”
Nuclear-powered vessels built The Soviet Union built more than 250 nuclear-powered vessels, about 200 of which were pulled out of service after the collapse of Communism in 1991. Desperate for cash, the Russian military then came up with the idea of converting nuclear-powered submarines into cargo vessels to ship goods under the Arctic ice, according to Bellona. In August 1995 the Russian Northern Fleet removed torpedoes from one of its attack Victor-III class submarines and sent it on a peaceful mission to deliver potatoes and other cargo to a port on the Yamal Peninsula. The experiment proved not to be economically viable. Later attempts to reconstruct Typhoon submarines to ship ore from Norilsk Nickel plant in western Siberia also led nowhere.
More recently, Russian scientist Yevgeny Velikhov, president of the Igor Kurchatov Institute, has been promoting the idea of using nuclear power in the oil and gas industry. Specifically, a subsea drillship known as an Akvabur (Aquadrill) capable of drilling a cluster of eight wells as deep as 11,550 feet each could be nuclear-powered. Based on tentative Russian plans, the power could come from two plants: a 300-MW floating nuclear power plant and a 105-MW subsurface nuclear power plant.
Budget impact at $3 billion Outfitting a subsea drilling site with a nuclear-based source of energy supply could increase a project’s budget by around $3 billion, Bellona estimates. This would cover the cost of building the nuclear power plants, but doesn’t include the necessary maintenance infrastructure, nuclear fuel supplies, or storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel.
“It should be noted that so far, Russian experience has not included a single example of successfully completing the construction, and proceeding to the operation, of a commercial floating nuclear power plant, let alone a subsurface one,” the report says. Nuclear facilities, including submarines, are liable to numerous accident risks, it points out. At around the time the report was published in November, 20 people died on a Russian nuclear submarine in the Sea of Japan when liquefied freon gas was released during an activation of the vessel’s fire-suppression system.
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