Russia will float out a new-generation nuclear ice-breaker by 2017 with two more to follow in 2020 under a government program to ensure commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) – a 6,000-km Arctic waterway stretching from the Barents Sea in the west to the Bering Strait in the east. Russia is the only country with a nuclear-powered ice-breaking fleet. By the early 2020s, the NSR is expected to start recouping its cost.
The NSR is currently operational all year round. As cargo traffic increases, Russia will need more ice-breakers to cut the way for commercial ships. At present, Russia has five ice-breakers in its Arctic waters. But by 2021, four of them will be decommissioned.
In former Soviet times, the NSR was closed for military reasons. Now that foreign commercial ships are allowed to use it, more and more companies are seeing it as an effective transport corridor connecting Europe and Asia, said Yuri Shcherbanin from the Institute for Economic Forecasts of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"The distance between Northern Europe and Northeast Asia is much shorter than the traditional route through the Far East and the Suez Canal. Cargo transportation along the Northern Sea Route has grown considerably over the past two years. More than 45 commercial ships sailed through it last year, including a liquefied gas tanker that brought over 66,000 tons of LNG from a Statoil plant in Norway to Japan."
In 2012, The Norwegian-flagged Marika tanker shipped more than 65,000 tons of aviation fuel produced from Sakhalin oil from Korea to Finland.
Within a few years, Russia will start developing oil and gas deposits on its Arctic shelf. The Novatek company is launching the construction of the Sabetta port and an LNG refinery in the Gulf of Ob. Future LNG exports both to Europe and Asia will require more ice-breakers, Mikhail Babenko, a gas environmental policy coordinator at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), told the Voice of Russia.
"It’s absolutely evident that no diesel-powered ship can manage to sail the whole length of the NSR without refueling. A diesel-powered ship can’t cut its way through ice as efficiently as a nuclear ice-breaker. Another big advantage of nuclear ice-breakers is the absence of soot emissions."
New-generation ice-breakers will surpass their current analogues over a whole range of parameters, said Alexander Voznesenksy, Director of the Baltiysky Zavod shipyard.
"The new ice-breaker will have a draft of between 8.5 m and 10.5 m. Thanks to its unique design, it can be operated both at the Northern Sea Route and in the estuaries of Siberian rivers. Its width – 34 m – means that it can cut the way for tankers with a dead weight of 100,000 tons."
New-generation ice-breakers will be equipped with advanced security and navigation systems.
Source: http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_08_25/Russia-to-build-three-new-generation-ice-breakers-for-Northern-Sea-Route-9892/
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