RUSSIA’S FLOATING NUCLEAR POWER PLANT
Foreword: What will those Russkies think of next? It’s just too bad our side couldn’t have developed something like this.
Murmansk, Russia (CNN) [In July 2019], a floating nuclear power plant called the Akademik Lomonosov will be towed via the Northern Sea Route to its final destination in the Far East, after almost two decades in construction.
It's part of Russia's ambition to bring electric power to a mineral-rich region. The 144-meter (472 feet) long platform painted in the colors of the Russian flag is going to float next to a small Arctic port town of Pevek, some 4,000 miles away from Moscow. It will supply electricity to settlements and companies extracting hydrocarbons and precious stones in the Chukotka region.
A larger agenda is at work too: aiding President Vladimir Putin's ambitious Arctic expansion plans, which have raised geopolitical concerns in the United States.
MY TAKE: Why didn’t WE think of something like that? Oh, that’s right, if we’d started such a project two decades ago when the Russkies did, the year would have been 1999, around the time when Slick Willie the Dick was being persecuted by those wascally Wepubwicans for committing perjury and obstruction of justice about his dallying in the White House. Forget about getting anything that makes sense done! Then there was W, auditioning to become Obama-Lite. And after that, of course, was the Obama itself, for whom Old Weird Joe was the under-study, who now is touting his longing for a return to mediocrity.
The Russkies, by the way, recognized the opportunity presented by global warming with the opening of an Arctic Sea shipping route, and realized they were going to need a relatively portable source of electrical power, but perhaps only temporarily. Their answer was the Admiral Nomonosov.
Those “geopolitical concerns” in the United States are the direct result of governmental and legislative sloppiness and laziness because we couldn’t see this coming or, if we could, we were simply too stupid to do anything about it. So, thanks again to political inertia, we’ll just have to live with our “geopolitical concerns.”
As they say in Mother Russia, “Tough Noogies!”
~ RAS
