Russia lays down world’s largest nuclear icebreaker

Source: Barents
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Russia is launching the construction of new-generation nuclear-powered icebreakers. The icebreaker of the LK-60Ya model, named Arktika as a tribute to the prominent Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker of the same name, is due to begin sea trials in 2017. The ship will prove effective for the deep-water areas of the Northern Sea Route and the shallow waters of Russia’s Arctic shelf. Russia is due to build three such icebreakers in the next decade.

Russia has been actively using the Northern Sea Route for almost 80 years now, with ice-breakers ensuring naval and civilian ship traffic across thick ice along the route. When the world’s first nuclear-powered ice-breaker Lenin started active operation in 1960, she turned over a new leaf in rescue ice operations on the Northern Sea Route. Bigger and more powerful icebreakers of the Arktika class, such as the 50 Years of Victory and the Yamal, have been playing the first fiddle, as it were, since the 1970s. These icebreakers can reach any point in the Arctic Ocean any time of the year. Smaller vessels, such as the Taimyrand the Vaygach, are capable of performing out at sea and in rivers’ offing.

Construction got under way at the Baltic shipyard in St. Petersburg on November 5th of a new-generation LK-60Ya nuclear-powered icebreaker of the 22220 project. The lead ship has been named as a tribute to her prominent Soviet predecessor, the Arktika, or Arctic, which was also the first ship of her project, as well as the first surface ship to reach the North Pole.

The lead icebreaker of the project is due to start active operation in 2018. She is 33 metres wider than the Arktika-class ice-breakers, enabling her to pave the way through the ice for bigger ships and at higher speeds. But a wider and proportionately longer hull unexpectedly resulted in the reduction of the ship’s draft to 8.5 metres. This prompted the idea of building a two-shallow draft icebreaker.

 The new-project icebreaker can vary her draft by using water ballast tanks and operating both offshore and in shallow waters, such as the Dudinka seaport, the Ob Bay etc. By increasing her draft by two or three metres, she is effective out at sea in breaking heavy ice up to three metres thick.

The new icebreaker will thus effectively replace both the Arktikatype vessels and the shallow-draft craft of the Taimyr type. It is held that three LK-60Ya icebreakers will be able to replace the four currently operational vessels. But a still more powerful LK-110Ya icebreaker is being designed (110 signifies the ship’s power plant output in MW) to negotiate at least 3.5 metres thick ice and ensure convoy navigation even in winter.

But Russia is also building a group of LK-25 diesel-powered icebreakers that will provide support for nuclear-powered icebreakers in ensuring navigation of major convoys and will prove helpful in the river mouths that are shallow even for the two-shallow draft LK-60Ya icebreakers. The LK-25s could likewise be used in the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, which are ice-covered in winter.

Finally, minor LK-18 and LK-16 diesel-powered icebreakers will prove effective at ice-covered ports from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Contracts worth a total of 20.4 billion roubles have been signed for the construction of four icebreakers with power plant output of 25 MW, 18 MW, and two ships with a power plant of 16 MW. The icebreakers are due to be built at the Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg.

The new icebreakers are seen as increasingly important, given that navigation of naval and civilian ships on the Northern Sea Route is due to grow significantly in the next 10 years. Russia will build over the period at least eight new icebreakers, but even that may prove insufficient, for Russia has failed to build new icebreakers for too many years.
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_11_07/Russia-to-build-icebreakers-to-secure-its-Arctic-power-position-8762/?bottom=news