Going Nuclear at the North Pole

Oct. 16, 2006 -- -- Despite the controversy that still surrounds the use of nuclear power, a Russian energy company has planned to build a floating nuclear power plant to fill the energy needs of the country's northern territories.

The plant would put two reactors on a barge that could dock and then be plugged into local power lines, providing affordable electricity for a part of the country where power is unreliable and expensive, according to Popular Science magazine.

Construction is scheduled to begin in 2007 and could be online generating power as early as 2010, according to announcements from RosEnergoAtom, the Russian national atomic energy company. The floating reactor will be built by Sevmash, a company that builds nuclear submarines in the northern city of Severodvinsk.

RosEnergoAtom currently has 31 nuclear reactors at 10 power plants across Russia, which provide 17 percent of the country's electricity, the company says.

Though the U.S. military used the idea in the 1960s and then a private power company tried it unsuccessfully in the 1970s, the plan represents a global revisiting of the question of the safety and logic of using nuclear power.

Despite the intense opposition nuclear power once faced, experts say the world is a very different place now, and the voice of opposition may not be quite as loud as it once was.

John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, says there's a lot of gray area in the power options for any nation.

"You're basically choosing which set of problems you're going to choose to live with," he says.

Nuclear power is cheap once the plant's up and running, but the plants themselves are very expensive -- the floating plant would cost roughly $200 million.

But the real danger is in the toxic byproducts created by nuclear power that aren't easily disposed of or stored. Despite the fact that the United States hasn't issued a license for the construction of a new plant since the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979, toxic materials from plants are still shipped around the country, in search of permanent homes.