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More nuclear power for Arctic shipping

The nuclear-powered container ship "Sevmorput" is getting a new life.

The world’s one and only nuclear powered container ship, the 26-year old “Sevmorput”, will from late 2015 be ready for operations in the Russian Arctic, Rosatom says.

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According to Rosatomflot, the state company managing the fleet of Russian nuclear-powered icebreakers, the “Sevmorput” will be put back in service already late 2015. Reconstruction works started in a Murmansk dry dock on October 1 and will continue until mid-December this year. Then, the vessel will be taken to the Atomflot base where operations will proceed, Rosatomflot informs.

Rosatomflot is part of the Russian state nuclear power company Rosatom.

Russian authorities have high hopes for a new life for the 26-year old vessel, which has lain idle for more than a decade. According to Rosatom Deputy Head Vyacheslav Pershukov, nuclear power is increasingly an option for Arctic developers, among them both Rosneft and Gazprom, and a new working group on the issue has been established, RIA Novosti reports.

As previously reported, the 260 meter long and 61.000 ton displacement “Sevmorput” was planned to be cut to needles after multiple years without duties. In 2012, the ship was even taken out of the Russian Ship Register.

The Sevmorput was commissioned in 1988 and the initial plan was to utilize it in international shipping. However due to port restrictions on nuclear-powered vessels in most countries in the world, it was used mainly on the route between Murmansk and Dudinka. In a bid to get the ship back in active service, the Murmansk Shipping Company in 2007 proposed to rebuild it into an oil drilling vessel. That initiative, however, stranded as the federal nuclear power company Rosatom took over the responsibility of the icebreaker fleet in 2008.

The ship also has icebreaking capacities.