ST. PETERSBURG, September 15. /TASS/. The Rubin design bureau offered a project of a nuclear submarine of a catamaran type to serve objects in the Arctic seas. The bureau's Chief Designer Evgeny Toropov presented the project at the RAO/CIS Offshore-2017 conference.
"The complex's task is to deliver equipment to any part of the Arctic regardless of the ice situation," he said. "While analyzing work of icebreakers in the Arctic, we saw works there require ongoing work of icebreakers, but not all the icebreakers we have can go to high latitudes. Thus, we are offering a variant of using an undersurface carrier, which could work in the entire Arctic sector."
"The Rubin bureau designed the transport-service complex under the Iceberg project, ordered by the Advanced Research Foundation (ARF)," ARF’s head of the project group Viktor Litvinenko told reporters. "We are doing it first of all with the purpose of developing the Arctic. The Arctic is a complex element, and if we manage to develop the Arctic, then we shall develop any part of the world ocean."
According to ARF’s press service, the complex will be used for deliveries and installations of a wide range of equipment to be used for marine deposits in waters of unfreezing seas in any other regions of the world ocean, where using of surface technical means is problematic due to hydrometeorology conditions.
"The complex will deliver and serve undersurface technical equipment at facilities of the oil and gas production, as well as of other technical means on the sea bottom or in the water," the press service said. "It also may be used to lift various objects off the sea bottom."
The project is at the high stage of design, and its term now depends on a decision on financing. The chief designer says the cost of the submarine, which may be produced at the existing facilities of Sevmash, would be by 40% lower than production of a similar-displacement military nuclear submarine.