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PEVEK, Russia — The water was hot, steamy, and plentiful, and Pavel Rozhkov enjoyed a non-nauseous shower, letting it flow over his body: On his bare skin, he felt the heat generated by an atomic reaction, being pumped directly from a nuclear reactor to his home.

“Personally, I am not worried,” said Mr. Rozhkov.

His shower came thanks to nuclear residential heating, which is extremely rare and was put into use only a year ago in the remote Siberian town of Pevek. The source isn’t a typical reactor with huge cooling towers, but the first of a new generation of smaller and potentially more versatile nuclear power plants – in this case on a barge floating nearby in the Arctic Ocean.

As countries around the world meet in Scotland this week to try to find new ways to mitigate climate change, Russia has embraced nuclear residential heating as a potential solution and hoped it could also bring a competitive advantage. Companies in the United States, China and France are considering building small reactors of the type currently connected to Pevek’s water facilities.

“This is very exciting,” said Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a phone interview. These small reactors could also heat greenhouses or provide heat for industrial purposes, he said. “The Russians are ahead,” he said as he implemented the new approach.

Nuclear-powered residential heating is different from space or water heaters powered by electricity generated from nuclear sources. Direct nuclear heating, tried in small pockets of Russia and Sweden, circulates water between a power station and homes, transferring heat directly from fissioning uranium atoms to homes.

Proponents of this idea say that heating homes with nuclear energy also has environmental benefits. First, it avoids wasting heat, which is typically vented as steam through the conical cooling towers of nuclear power plants, and instead captures it for use in residential heating if customers like it.

Still, some experts are concerned about the potential risks, citing the many leaks and accidents on Soviet and Russian submarines and icebreakers using similar small reactors. For example, nuclear submarines sank in 1989 and 2000.

“This is nuclear technology and the starting point has to be dangerous,” said Andrei Zolotkov, a researcher at Bellona, ​​a Norwegian environmental group. “It’s the only way to think about it.”

Mr. Rozhkov’s wife, Natalia, was initially skeptical. They can see the new nuclear plant about a mile from the kitchen window. He said he was “concerned for the first two days” after his apartments were connected to one of the reactors’ cooling circuits. But the feeling passed.

“Everything new is scary,” said Ms. Rozhkova. Still, someone has to be first, he said, adding, “We were the closest, so they tied us up first.”

Professor Buongiorno said the experiment in Siberia could play a vital role in convincing countries that using nuclear power to limit climate change would require using it to generate more than just electricity, which is the source of about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Decarbonizing the power grid will only save you a quarter of the way,” he said. “The rest comes from all these other things.”

Yes, but a nuclear shower? Professor Buongiorno said he’d buy one – but acknowledged that “it won’t work if people aren’t satisfied with the technology.”

Nuclear heating experiment does not make Russia a crusader on climate change. As one of the world’s heaviest polluters, it has taken contradictory stances on global warming, and Pevek is an example: It also converts its heating to nuclear energy instead of coal. taking advantage of climate change In the Arctic, it is resurgent as a port as shipping lanes become more navigable.

The Russians also have a long and checkered history of using nuclear technologies for civilian applications that are not generally accepted elsewhere. The Soviet Union considered detonating atomic bombs to produce open-pit mines and to dig irrigation canals. Russia operates the only nuclear-powered civilian surface fleet with icebreakers.

In several places during the Soviet era, engineers hooked up a type of reactor used to create plutonium for bombs to nearby homes to heat it. Reactors continued to work this way for years, even when there was no need to make weapons.

The nuclear facility in Pevek is located on the Akademik Lomonosov, a barge the size of a city block. The idea of ​​small reactors is not new. In the 1960s, before the anti-nuclear movement gained traction, they were seen as a promising technology. The United States operated a barge-based reactor to electrify the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1976, and Sweden used nuclear heating in a suburb of Stockholm from 1963 to 1974.

Now, two other plants in Russia besides Pevek also use nuclear residential heating; but in these cases, it is a byproduct of large electrical installations.

Soon in Pevek the town’s communal steam bath or banya will also run on nuclear power. Russian state nuclear company Rosatom connected reactors in a neighborhood to heating pipes in June 2020. It is currently expanding its hot water service to the entire town, which has about 4,500 inhabitants.

The two cores of the plant are cooled by a series of water cycles. In each reactor, the first cycle is contaminated with radioactive particles. However, this water never leaves the plant. Via heat exchangers, it transfers heat – but not dirty water – to other loops.

At Pevek, one of these loops is the piping system that leaves the factory, branches off and supplies hot water to the houses.

The company supports a number of security features. The facility can withstand the impact of a small aircraft. The container holding it doubles as a containment structure. And the water circulating in the buildings is at a higher pressure than the cooling loop, where it generates heat within the facility, in theory preventing radiation leakage from spreading to the city.

Residents can’t stop buying nuclear-powered heat, but for the most part they welcomed the new plant. Deputy mayor Maksim Zhurbin said no one had complained in public hearings before the barge arrived.

“We explained to the population what was going to happen and there were no objections,” he said. “We use the peaceful atom.”

Irina K. Buriyeva, a librarian, said she appreciated the ample heat and electricity. “To be honest, we try not to think about it,” he said about the risks of radiation leaks or explosions.

Russia is the first in developing small civilian reactors, but it is hardly an outlier. This month, French President Emmanuel Macron proposed an expansion His country’s vast nuclear industry with small reactors as part of the solution to climate change. China is building small floating reactors modeled after Russian design.

Companies in the United States, including General Electric and Westinghouse, have about a dozen designs ready for testing as of 2023. In an extreme case of miniaturization, the US military ordered a reactor small enough to fit in a shipping container; Two companies, BWXT and X-energy, are competing to deliver the air-cooled device.

However, Germany followed a different path: The country decided to close all nuclear power plants. fukushima Disaster in Japan in 2011

Kirill Toropov, deputy director of the floating nuclear power plant in Pevek, said the benefits were already visible locally, citing less snow tainted by coal soot. “We need to take note of this positive ecological moment,” he said.

Mr. Rozhkov, a 41-year-old accountant who has bathed and bathed three children in nuclear hot water for a year, said that Russia’s use of small reactors in icebreakers gave him confidence in the technology.

“We’re not worried as details are being worked out,” he said.

His wife said they were “believers,” adding: “There are things we cannot control. I can only pray for our safety, for the safety of our town. I say, ‘God, it’s in your hands’.”