Development status and future prospect of floating nuclear power plant

At the technical level, floating nuclear power plants are vulnerable to Marine environmental conditions, and it is difficult to meet the space requirements of relevant equipment and facilities, and it is easy to produce "common cause failures". Floating nuclear power plants operate in the Marine environment for a long time, and are susceptible to the impact of salt spray, mold and Marine organisms, resulting in corrosion of system pipes and equipment, adhesion of Marine organisms and other destructive problems, which will lead to the decrease or damage of pipeline heat transfer performance, affecting its normal operation. At the same time, the Marine environment is easy to cause periodic changes in the spatial position of the floating nuclear power plant system, and introduce additional inertial force fields brought by periodic changes. These factors can directly affect the hydraulic and heat transfer characteristics of the medium, and then affect the physical characteristics of the reactor, and eventually cause damage to the system of the nuclear power plant. In addition, compared with traditional nuclear power plants, the internal space of floating nuclear power plants is relatively small, so its internal equipment has strict restrictions in terms of volume and weight, and its safety facilities cannot achieve the requirements of multiplicity, diversity and independence, which is prone to "Common Cause Failure". That is, several devices fail at the same time due to a specific single fault.

At the regulatory level, relevant policies, laws and standards are not yet comprehensive, and the international offshore nuclear energy regulatory system needs to be further improved. In the process of development of floating nuclear power plant, it involves design and construction, safety and emergency, operation and supervision and many other links, so it is necessary to establish a relatively complete system of policies, laws and standards to better supervise its development. However, at present, the relevant international policy standards are not perfect, and China has not established the corresponding policy standard system. At present, the overall guidance and relevant requirements for the international research and development of floating Nuclear power plants mainly include the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons). NPT, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Comprehensive documents such as UNCLOS and the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), but these documents are limited in their coverage and do not provide specific guidance for the development of floating nuclear power plants. In addition, although the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia and other countries in recent years have issued their own floating nuclear power plant research and construction guidance documents and policy standards, but still not enough to support the overall requirements of the development of floating nuclear power plants, its development is still faced with imperfect policy standards, regulatory system is not sound and other problems, it is urgent to establish a more complete offshore nuclear energy regulatory system.

Third, the future prospects of floating nuclear power plants

Although the development of floating nuclear power plants still faces many difficulties, with the continuous progress of relevant technologies and the deepening of the global trend of decarbonization, the development speed of floating nuclear power plants will be further accelerated. At the same time, the traditional nuclear power countries represented by the United States and Russia will continue to increase investment in the field of floating nuclear power plants, in order to meet their own power needs at the same time, seize the development of floating nuclear power plants. Overall, the future development of floating nuclear power plants will show the following two trends.

First, barge nuclear power plant technology will become more mature, and will gradually become the mainstream development direction of floating nuclear power plants. Compared with other types of floating nuclear power plants, barge type nuclear power plants have the longest history of development, and the barge form it uses can play to the advantages of the traditional shipbuilding industry, help floating nuclear power plant technology to achieve rapid development, and further reduce its overall research and construction cost. At present, the United States, France and South Korea and other countries are simultaneously focusing on barge nuclear power plants while developing their own representative floating nuclear power plants. In 2022, the French Bureau Veritas (BV) and the American company ThorCon reached a technical certification agreement to cooperate on the development of a 500MW floating nuclear fission power station integrated in a barge for operation in Indonesia. South Korea's Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) received a certificate of Approval in principle from the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) in January for its barge-type nuclear power plant design concept. The company will develop its floating nuclear power plant based on a compact molten salt reactor technology developed by Danish company Seaborg Technologies. In addition to the "Academician Lomonosov", Russia also plans to build a number of barge-type nuclear power plants to further improve the ability to provide electricity to remote areas such as the Far East. It can be seen that countries are vigorously promoting the research and construction process of barge-type nuclear power plants, and the future of this type of nuclear power plants will gradually become the mainstream development direction of floating nuclear power plants.