Bellona reported that Russian officials will back the overhaul of an ailing Far Eastern shipyard as they plan to build an enormous nuclear icebreaker the Kremlin hopes will make it dominant in Arctic waterways. The icebreaker is the ‘Leader’, a vessel that firstly appeared four years ago. Now, the Russian Government is mobilizing billions of dollars to renovate the Zvezda shipyard to construct the vessel.
Deputy Prime Minister, Yury Borisov, commented that the Kremlin will issue an official order for the Leader’s construction next month.
In the meantime, he announced that the shipyard will be renovated by Rosneft, Russia’s enormous state oil company, which has high hopes for drilling oil in the Arctic with help from ice-crushing nuclear behemoths like the Leader.
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Moreover, the Leader firstly appeared on the cover of the United Shipbuilding Corporation’s company magazine in 2015.
The cover reflected the vessel as a prized yacht owned by a Kremlin-friendly oligarch than it did to any of Russia’s more muscular specimens of nuclear icebreaking steel.
According to engineers, the Leader’s maintenance needs will be minimal. According to local sources, the Leader would be built of materials capable of ‘self-diagnosing’ metal corrosion, and would further be able to ‘self-heal’ in the case when damage is detected.
However, Leader’s construction is expensive. The vessel is expected to cost $1.6 billion, and Russian officials have said they intend to build at least three.
Despite the expenses, another challenge is that not only the Zvezda shipyard hasn’t constructed a nuclear icebreaker previously, it hasn’t built much for the past 20 years.
Concluding, Alexei Rakhimov, head of the United Shipbuilding Corporation and owner of the Baltic Shipyard highlighted the political nature of signing the Leader’s construction to the Zvezda shipyard, and in the meantime noted that building an icebreaker at the distant Pacific Ocean port makes little economic sense.