ST. PETERSBURG, June 16. /TASS/. The Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg has floated out the hull of what will become the world’s largest and most powerful twin-reactor icebreaker, The Arktika, a TASS correspondent reports from the scene of the event.
Taking part in the gala ceremony were Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko, head of the Rosatom corporation, Sergey Kiriyenko, Federation Council Member, president of the State Polar Academy Artur Chilingarov, president of the United Shipbuilding Corporation Aleksey Rakhmanov and others.
"The Arktika’s launch is a victory in all senses," Rosatom chief Sergey Kiriyenko said. "Today we can say that by the end of 2017 this icebreaker will join Rosatomflot. This will open up fundamentally new opportunities in front of our country in terms of maintaining the national defenses and year-round navigation in the Arctic and ensuring economic development in a region that is of crucial importance to Russia and the whole world."
The keel of the nuclear-powered ice-breaker The Arktika (project 22220) was laid at the Baltic Shipyard in November 2013. The project’s costs are estimated at 122 billion rubles ($1.9 bln). The shipbuilder employed certain technologies and know-hows that have never been used before in any other nuclear-powered vessel. The ship’s variable buoyancy feature will allow for helping ship convoys through ice floes and frozen river mouths.
The icebreaker will have two water distillers, each capable of processing 70 tonnes of water.
At the moment the Baltic Plant has already assembled 10,000 tonnes of metal structures. The preliminary assembly shop is building superstructures for The Arktika - the head ship in the series, and several sections for The Sibir. Also it is about to start making the first three frame sections for The Ural.
The nuclear power plant Ritm-200 will be brought to the plant from Podolsk, near Moscow, in June.