Russians convert nuclear icebreaker into a hotel

by Annie Scott on

“Lenin” is the name of this ship, which was launched in 1957. It was the first nuclear powered surface ship and the first nuclear powered civilian vessel in the world.

So what kind of ship is it? An icebreaker. Icebreakers can literally cut through permanent and seasonal ice in the water — they are specially shaped for this and are actually rather clumsy in open water.

This 134-meter long, 19 ton ship was decommissioned in 1989, and on May 5th, it sailed into Murmansk, where it is now being converted into a luxury hotel and museum.

It makes sense — the ship was quite like a hotel, complete with cabins, a library, a cinema, a club, and several dining rooms.

Vyacheslav Ruksha, head of nuclear icebreaker operator Atomflot, told Ekho Moscow that there is no radiation risk. All aboard!

[via The Rich Times]

Riding the Ice Breakers

by Neil Woodburn on

I never really considered a trip on an ice breaker until I recently read an article in Popular Mechanics detailing just how amazing such an experience would be.

Picture this. Sitting atop one of the strongest machines ever built as it crashes and pounds it way through ice as thick as a man is tall.

Writer Margo Pfeiff recently enjoyed this show of brute force while riding on the Canadian coast guard icebreaker Des Groseilliers as it resupplied a weather station on Ellesmere Island (photo essay here). “This ship is like a big Tonka toy,” she was told by the navigation officer with a certain amount of childish gleam in his eyes. And I can’t blame him. There’s not a man on this planet who could resist the enjoyment of crushing massive sheets of ice into “school bus-size chunks rolling in all directions.”

Since the article was published in Popular Mechanics instead of a travel magazine, Pfeiff also delves into the science behind the icebreaking. I often wondered how ships survived such abuse and now I know how. The following, in Pfeiff’s words, are just a few of the cool modifications that make this happen.

–2-in.-thick steel hull reinforced with a web of steel port-to-starboard stiffeners
–A heeling system [that] can shift 143 tons of water from a tank on one side of the ship to the other in 13 seconds, enabling the vessel to rock free from thick ice
–A bubbler system, in which compressed air is forced through rows of holes across the bow to form a cushion between ship and ice
–an abrasion-resistant, low-friction coating that is only 15 in. thick and feels like Tupperware to the touch