Sea life: floating nuclear power plants are compelling stuff

The concept 115m vessel, aims to provide high levels of safety and security with in-house vessel design and nuclear components, fuel, and services. The ship will combine traditional propulsion with a small modular reactor that can be activated and deactivated as needed. It can deliver the power to shore using buoyed power delivery cables and has shallow draft hulls for manoeuvrability in military activities or during disaster response to remote areas when harbor access is limited.

The US Department of Homeland Security's Federal Emergency Management Agency-a department familiar with managing both nuclear risk and disaster recovery-could be a better choice to refresh America's long-forgotten legacy of projecting power-electrical power-from the sea to shore but has to wrestle with the US Navy's secretive grip on nuclear technology.

Nuclear energy has already been in use for 70 years in naval ships, commercial ships and icebreakers propulsion. Today there are 162 nuclear powered vessels floating on top and below the 70% of the planet's surface, the oceans.

My support for nuclear power on ships has been a matter of record since I bluffed my way on board the nuclear-powered passenger cargo ship Savannah in 1967. The operational capability of that ship was 25 times more than any conventional powered vessel of the same size. In marine propulsion applications, absolutely nothing comes close to nuclear, it was then, and is the same now, and their ability to put power ashore has always been there. Watch https://youtu.be/9Oottmvak7c

Floating NPPs can be built in a factory, assembled in a shipyard and transported to a site, all of which may help to speed up construction and keep costs down. Canada, China, Denmark, South Korea, Russia and the USA are each working on marine SMR and MMR designs, some are in advanced development.

However, FNPPs are not in competition with land based SMRs and MMRs, but provide an attractive option for many remote regional areas such as Vilyuchinsk, the lead example in FNPP installations.

About 5,500 nautical miles south of Vilyuchinsk, in the city of Canberra, the Lilliputian leaders of Australia, despite neighbours Indonesia and Singapore investigating FNPPs, have convinced the locals to ignore nuclear and have blanketted huge tracts of their productive farmland with unreliable solar and wind farms. Australians should pay attention, get off their fat backsides and dump such hopeless leadership.