Chukotka, the newest nuclear-powered icebreaker to leave a Russian slipway, has taken a decisive step toward service. Its starboard RITM-200 reactor reached minimum controlled power on 26 October 2026, the stage at which a reactor first sustains a chain reaction at a deliberately tiny output. Each of the ship’s two reactors is rated at 175 MW thermal, and the second has yet to follow.
Save more, waste less: The Cool Down’s newsletter sends smart, simple changes that help you and the planet in your everyday life.
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
The vessel is the fifth of Russia’s Project 22220 class, a 173-metre hull that is 34 metres wide and rises 57 metres from the waterline to the top of the mainmast. Builders at the Baltic Shipyard in St. Petersburg laid the keel in December 2020 and launched the hull in November 2024. Nearly two years of outfitting followed, and the reactor milestone is the first time one of the ship’s own reactors has been brought up to power.
Minimum controlled power and the road to sea trials
The shipyard reported the milestone, and World Nuclear News relayed it on 26 October 2026, adding that both reactors will now go through physical start-up and a series of plant tests. Before that, engineers calibrate the launch equipment: the reactor itself, its controls, and the protection and monitoring systems. The ship is currently undergoing mooring trials alongside the pier and is preparing for factory sea trials, but no delivery date appears in the shipyard’s account.
Earlier pier work checked the safety backbone. In March 2026 the shipyard tested three emergency diesel generators rated at 250 kW apiece, designed to start automatically if the reactor’s emergency protection system trips. Mooring trials began at the end of 2025 and exercise every system aboard, which the yard described as a painstaking process of adjusting thousands of instruments. Reactor power-up comes only after that ground has been covered.
RITM-200 reactor design and the 40-year core of the ship
Each RITM-200 unit weighs more than 147 tonnes, stands 7.3 metres tall and measures 3.3 metres across. The design is built to keep working while the hull rolls up to 45 degrees and pitches up to 15 degrees, a requirement for a vessel that plunges through pack ice. The reactors have a 40-year life and need refuelling every seven years, so the ship can run for most of a decade between fuel loads. Background on how such propulsion compares with other reactors afloat sits in the World Nuclear Association’s overview of nuclear-powered ships.
Afrikantov OKBM designs and supplies the RITM-200 and RITM-400 reactor internals, while ZiO-Podolsk fabricates the vessels and performs test assembly. According to the World Nuclear News account, 15 RITM-200 reactors have been completed and 13 more are under construction.
Where Chukotka sits in the Project 22220 line
Arktika, Sibir, Ural and Yakutia are already in service, escorting cargo ships along the Northern Sea Route. Two more hulls are in the Baltic Shipyard’s pipeline: Leningrad had both of its reactors installed in August 2026 and Stalingrad is also under construction. All of them come from the yard of United Shipbuilding Corporation, Baltic Shipyard, which also has Stalingrad on its books. Chukotka’s own path from keel laying in December 2020 to reactor power in October 2026 spans nearly six years.
Alexey Likhachev, director general of Rosatom, argued at the November 2024 launch of Chukotka that cargo traffic on the route had grown nearly tenfold over the preceding decade, with more than 3 million tonnes moving in 2024, a 40% rise on the year before. The icebreakers exist to keep that traffic moving through the winter.
Rosatom’s target of 15 to 17 icebreakers and the 2030 Rossiya
Rosatom told the 2025 Arctic Forum that the route needs 15 to 17 icebreakers, up from 10 or 11, to handle planned volumes of 100 million to 150 million tonnes a year, as World Nuclear News reported in April 2025. Likhachev’s blunt summary was that the ships must be built. The larger Project 10510 icebreaker Rossiya, with two RITM-400 reactors, is meant to break ice up to 4.3 metres thick and clear a channel 50 metres wide, with 2030 the latest reported target for service.
Sergey Zybko, who runs the state agency GlavSevmorput, offered a sobering counterpoint at the same forum: ice conditions had been deteriorating over the past few years, he said, and research does not show warming making the route easier, with no significant change in winter and spring ice cover expected before 2050. For Rosatom, the parent state corporation at rosatom.ru, that argues for more hulls rather than fewer.
What remains unanswered is timing. Neither the shipyard nor Rosatom has stated when Chukotka will be handed over, and the sequence of physical start-up for both reactors, plant tests, factory sea trials and acceptance has not been dated. The 26 October milestone shows the starboard reactor works at minimum power; it does not yet show the ship breaking ice.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
Save more, waste less: Subscribe to The Cool Down →
We may earn a commission if you sign up.
More from Morning Overview
- NOAA now gives this winter a 75% chance of the strongest El Nino since 1950
- Doctors warn a silent liver disease now affects one in three American adults
- The FBI told the rest of ShinyHunters to surrender after a 24-year-old was arrested
- Two passengers died at an Ohio toll plaza, and the NTSB now wants the cash lanes shut
