Russia Building World's Largest Nuclear Powered Icebreaker
- 12 years ago
Russia Building World's Largest Nuclear Powered Icebreaker - as part of the news series by GeoBeats.
Russia has plans to build the world’s biggest nuclear powered ship that is able to break through ice and navigate shallow rivers. Russia is the only country with a fleet of nuclear powered ice breaking ships, and Russian waters encompass much of the Arctic Ocean.
A quarter of the oil and gas resources on Earth are thought to exist under the Arctic Ocean, which means that being able to access that area could be a very important issue in the future.
"The amount of diesel you need to burn to advance through the Arctic ice is enormous, leading to lots of CO2 discharge, so using a nuclear reactor is a big advantage, but there's a risk, because there's nothing in the Arctic to repair a nuclear ship in case of an incident," Anna Kireeva of Bellona, an international ecological organization, told the BBC.
You can take a ride on an icebreaking ship from Russia’s fleet to Heard and McDonald Islands, two of the world’s most remote islands located in the Deep South Indian Ocean a little more than a thousand miles north of Antarctica.
Russia has plans to build the world’s biggest nuclear powered ship that is able to break through ice and navigate shallow rivers. Russia is the only country with a fleet of nuclear powered ice breaking ships, and Russian waters encompass much of the Arctic Ocean.
A quarter of the oil and gas resources on Earth are thought to exist under the Arctic Ocean, which means that being able to access that area could be a very important issue in the future.
"The amount of diesel you need to burn to advance through the Arctic ice is enormous, leading to lots of CO2 discharge, so using a nuclear reactor is a big advantage, but there's a risk, because there's nothing in the Arctic to repair a nuclear ship in case of an incident," Anna Kireeva of Bellona, an international ecological organization, told the BBC.
You can take a ride on an icebreaking ship from Russia’s fleet to Heard and McDonald Islands, two of the world’s most remote islands located in the Deep South Indian Ocean a little more than a thousand miles north of Antarctica.