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.

The Lesser of Two Evils

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.

"It's just not evident that anyone has a convincing story on how to get rid of this stuff," Pike says. "One of the reasons the U.S. was able to turn away from nuclear power ... is because we have all this coal."

Through the use of coal -- a resource abundant in North America -- and what Pike says is an American aversion to nuclear power, the United States has been on a steady diet of coal for years.

But with the good comes the bad, and with coal the bad is that it pumps dangerous greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which aids in the destruction of the ozone layer and speeds up global warming.

Eventually, There Will Be No Choices

Pike says it's the way we live -- or more specifically the way we choose to live -- that causes many of our power problems. There are lots of options for clean and cheap power if we chose to invest in them.

"We prefer to spend half-a-trillion dollars to defend various oil fields around the world," he says. "We still think it's our god-given right to drive around in these gigantic, enormous SUVs; we insist on running everything on gasoline, an amazingly dangerous, toxic chemical."

Though nuclear energy may evoke a knee-jerk reaction from some, Pike believes that if we want to move toward the future of energy and give the nations of the world options to help them live more harmoniously with the environment, we need to make significant changes, and fast.

"Eventually all this stuff will be forced upon us, because eventually we will run out of oil," Pike says. "Or eventually it will be so expensive that the direct production costs will be so high and the supply will be so scarce that it just won't be used for things."

Pike points to Europe, where he says people live in high-density housing and drive small cars, as opposed to the United States, where we live in low-density housing and drive big cars.

"They pay $6 for a gallon of gas," he says. "Eventually we'll be paying $6 a gallon and have $3 a gallon housing and then we'll really have a problem."