The keel-laying ceremony for the first Arctic-type Nuclear Floating Power Unit (NFPU) with RITM transport reactor vessels has taken place at the shipyard in China. The barge will be 140m long and 30m wide, weighing 9,549 tons unequipped and 19,088 tons equipped. This first hull should be delivered to Russia for completion and installation of power equipment by the end of 2023.
This is the first out of totally four NFPUs with the single capacity of 106 MW, designed for offshore operation near the Cape Nagleynyn in the Chukotka Autonomous Region. A contract to supply four Nuclear Floating Power Units was signed by Rosatom’s machine building division Atomenergomash (AEM) in 2021. Due to the stringent deadlines for implementation of the project and a high workload of domestic shipyards, the contract for manufacture of the hulls for the first two units was awarded to a foreign shipyard. The project scheme and the builder of the third and fourth NFPUs’ hulls should be determined in the fourth quarter of 2022.
In parallel, the manufacture of nuclear power plant equipment for all four floating power units is already underway in Russia. The RITM-200C reactors that will be installed on the NFPUs, are fully manufactured by the companies of Atomenergomash Group. These reactors were, in particular, developed by OKBM Afrikantov (Nizhny Novgorod). The reactor vessel blanks are cast near St. Petersburg – at the production site of “AEM-technologies”, the machining and final assembly of the reactor vessel takes place at ZiO-Podolsk, near Moscow.
(Source and image: Rosatom – Rosatom’s first NFPU Akademic Lomonosov)