A Floating Nuclear Power Plant?

The fact that it is on or above an enormous water supply will help with cooling, although i'm not sure what effect the water's salinity would have on the plant. Of course, should it sink or malfunction it will diretcly contaminate a lot of water.

Nuclear waste problem solved in one - chuck it over the side!

Both the US and Russia have been building floating nuclear power plants for some 50 years, as part of their naval nuclear power programs. The US plants have a very good safety record. Sea water for secondary system cooling (steam plant condensers and whatnot) is something that has been done for a long time as well, for both shipboard and on-shore nuclear and conventional power plants. Some care in the selection of alloys for the components, and proper cathodic protection is needed, of course.

True, I hadn't thought of subs and other nuclear powered ships as reactors. Sevmash is after all, one of the main manufacturing points for the Russian navy. I imagine this reactor would be quite a bit more powerful, though.

Consider the place where the plant should be built on the groud: winter 9 months and possibility to work at open air only a short little time during summer. In this time there is light all the day and you have to organize a yard in a very unusual way for building entreprizes, working 24 hrs on 3 shifts. In the Russian shipyards, which are much more southern and do not need to make nuclear submarines or aircarriers any more, there is capacity to produce large nuclear reactors. So why not to take advantage of this capacity, built comfortably the plant, in a place where climate is favourable and than move it where it has to be used? Probably it is cheaper than a big buiding yard across the Artic circle.

It's not so much the effect that it will have on the water (probably maintains a small ice-free pool around it) as the effect it would have on the ground if it was on land. After a fairly short time the heat leaking from the plant would start thawing some of the permafrost layer underneath it making some of it squishy. No matter how strong a concrete raft they put under the plant the possibility of the whole plant starting to sink, possibly lop-sided, into the ground is, to me, something to be avoided.

Would this plant become a target for terrorist? If it were to be attacked, what would the repercussions be on the water supply/environment around it, or for the rest of the world?

Yes, anyone who is used to the conventional laws of physics will disagree with someone who claims to have invented an engine that produces power without using fuel! Also quite a few may point out that atoms lose electrons (or gain them) when going through a normal chemical reaction. Nuclear power is based on exploiting the natural decay of radioactive elements, so a first order approximation is that fewer particles will escape into the ionosphere because the effect of the containment vessels will outweigh the effect of interaction between decaying and not-yet-decaying atoms to speed up the process of decay (the balance tips the other way in bombs, but it's over sixty years since the USA used (as against testing) a nuclear bomb. If Robert Dave has overcome the law of conservation of energy, he'll get a Nobel Prixe for that which should fund the next stage of development of his engine.

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The concept of floating commercial nuclear plants is not particularly new. I was co-inventor of an off-shore nuclear facility for which the patents were granted in the 1980's. Westinghouse was developing a design (that looks a lot like the Russian plan) for an FNPP for which they had a contract with PSEG of New Jersey to build three units. Licensing had begun and the plants were to be called the Atlantic 1-3. They built a spectacular shipyard facility in Jacksonville Florida with huge graving docs and two of the largest overhead cranes ever built. The entire project was scuttled by TMI.

FNPP's can have a lot of benefits, but the Westinghouse (and Russian) designs don't take advantage of the key ones, and as noted elsewhere, the fuel intended for the Russian plan creates other issues. The primary advantage of the Westinghouse and Russian designs is that they are standardized and can be built in a centralized shipyard. This will reduce per-plant costs dramatically.

By way of background, I am an engineer that ended up as an investor. I created and ran a multi-billion dollar proprietary investment business at one of the world's largest fiancial institutions. Was also directly involved in the first sale-leaseback transactions for nuclear facilities in the US. If anyone is interested in talking about this more, please post a reply and I will contact you.

For the gentleman that was concerned by the electrons being released by terrestrial nuclear fission, please see the web page http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/ .