Russia Producing Power From Tides

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29916, 1 September 1962, Page 8

Russia Producing Power From Tides

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) MOSCOW. Soviet engineers have been given the goahead for testing one of their most ambitious projects yet—the production of electricity from the power of the coastal tides. Blueprints have already been approved and a site surveyed on the coast of the Barents Sea, near Murmansk, for a tidal power station, a pilot project heralding bigger things to come.

The brain behind the project is a scientist named Lev Bernstein, who has made himself the official authority on tidal power stations and who has been dreaming for years of putting his ideas into practice.

He has had his plans accepted for a small power station to be built in Motovsky Bay, on the Kola peninsula, where the last drops of the warm Gulf Stream keep the coast ice-free all the year round. This ' station will be only small, developing just over 1000 kilowatts But Mr Bernstein is looking forward with confidence to the time, about 20 years hence, when he hopes to build a station across Mezen Bay, in the White Sea, which will produce 36,000 million kilowatts. In an article in “Literary Gazette,” Mr Bernstein stressed the great advantages to mankind when he can tap the power of the moon, or. as he put It, cosmic energy Work is expected to begin soon on the first pilot project just north-west of Murmansk, the biggest inhabited town above the Arctic Circle. The station will be named Kislogubsky and will be brought to the site piece by piece and erected on prepared foundations

Motovsky Bay lies about 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, near the Norwegian frontier

A special building complex has been designed, incorporating a winter garden where the lonely residents will be able to live and work without having to move outside the buildings during the long polar night and in the low winter temperatures

Mr Bernstein agreed that, because of its necessarily intermittent work, the station by itself would not pay for the cost of construction. But he believed ‘hat it would avoid the fa • of a similar American experiment with a tidal powei station tn the 1930's This station was described at the time as “economic madness" and “an expensive whim " Mr Bernstein said that the real reason why it was abandoned was that its engineering was inadequate.

With the new techniques now at his disposal. Mr Bernstein says that engineering will present him with no problems. Special reversible generators are to be installed. These will make electricity on both the incoming and outgoing tide. The station will be linked to the local grid from which it will draw current at offpeak periods. This current will be fed to the generators which, in effect, turns the generators into pumping motors. Sea water will then be pumped up from the sea into the reservoir penned in by the dam across the bay. thus providing a greater head of water.

Mr Bernstein’s designing section is already working on the blueprints of the second tidal power station, again to be situated along the Murmansk coast, at Lumbovsky Bay, to the north-east of the Kola Peninsula. This one is expected to produce 400,000 kilowatts His designers also have their sights on the gigantic ,56.000 kilowatt station in the Mezen gorge. A similar idea has been put forward by a Frenchman, Mr Robert Gibre, who wants to build a tidal power station on the Cotentin Peninsula. in Normandy. Mr Bernstein welcomes Mr Gibre's idea and, looking further ahead, talks of the immense benefits which could come from utilising the tides on an international scale by building power dams in the Channel, on the White Sea coast, across the Bering Straits between Alaska and Siberia, and in New Brunswick, Maine. and Nova Scotia.