• America already has scores of floating nuclear plants in service and performing beautifully.  Collectively, they are called the U.S. Nuclear Navy, which has many decades of highly reliable and safe operations to its credit.

• By avoiding the building of land-based plants only, which must be impervious to both earthquakes and tsunamis -- particularly following Japan's recent disaster -- FNPP units afloat in double- or triple-hulled barges in 20- to 30-foot-deep "slips" along inland waters might require less than half the funding and half the time to build and bring online.

• Even in the event of an earthquake, the ruggedly fabricated vessels in which the nuclear unit (or units) is installed would be greatly cushioned by flotation in a small, strongly walled pool -- and even if that pool were to lose its water, the FNPP would simply sit in the mud until routinely re-floated.

• With regard to both cost and time of construction, such plants would be built in all-weather, climate-controlled sections of American shipyards -- both several existing yards and new, specially designed ones -- with the nuclear power units per se (which might be built elsewhere) to be inserted toward the very end of the manufacturing process, or even after the multi-unit "barge" has been positioned onsite.

• The relatively small nuclear power units themselves could be any one of several designs which have already been (or might soon be) approved by the NRC -- plus the option of declassified versions of mature Navy designs, and the new "pebble bed" and small, site-specific "Hyperion" plants as well.  The following excerpt from an April 6, 2011 Wall Street Journal article by MIT's head of nuclear science and engineering, Dr. Richard Lester, speaks directly to this point:

Today's most advanced designs go even further toward the goal of ‘walk-away safety,' that is, reactors that can shut themselves down and cool themselves off without electric power or any human intervention at all. Longer term possibilities include lifetime fueling, which would allow a single charge of fuel to power a reactor for its entire life -- making it in effect a nuclear battery.

• Plant positioning (which is normally on or near water anyway) would be relatively easy and inexpensive -- and would even allow for repositioning onsite or for relocation to an entirely different site in years to come, or for easy replacement of an entire reactor module.

Now however, the resourceful Russians have come up with an idea, one that they hope could not only secure the country's position as the preeminent Arctic power, but also blossom into a lucrative export business: floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs).

The idea of FNPPs is simple, if a little scary: Outfit a barge with two 35-megawatts reactors, float them to a spot off the coast and run cables to land to distribute your power. An FNPP set-up this size could power a city of 200,000.

The concept has some people screaming about "floating Chernobyls," but the technology is safer than that. For one thing, the portable reactors are fairly proven hardware, derived from those used on the icebreakers. And while any nuclear reactor poses real dangers if something goes wrong, the FNPPs are comparative pipsqueaks - their 35 MW output only a fraction of the Chernobyl plant's 4,000.

A prototype vessel has already been launched at a St. Petersburg shipyard; after reactors are affixed it will be towed to Vilyuchinsk, a city (pop. 25,000) in the Russian Far East that is home to a squadron of nuclear submarines. It is expected to be operational in 2012.