The wind and rain whipped by at several feet per second as crew members stepped outside for a quick smoke, but the world's only floating nuclear power plant barely shifted in the choppy waves of the Kola bay.

The length of one-and-a-half football pitches, with its once rusty hull repainted in the white, red and blue of the national flag, the Academic Lomonosov looks the part as the vanguard of Russia's “nuclearification” of the warming Arctic.

Later this month it will be towed 3,000 miles from the northwestern corner of Russia to the Chukotka region next to Alaska, where it will provide steam heat and eventually electricity to the coastal gold-mining town of Pevek, population 4,000.

The state corporation Rosatom is trumpeting the Academic Lomonosov as the next big step in nuclear energy and a possible solution to electricity needs in Africa and Asia. It's part of a surge in nuclear vessels along what Russia hopes will be a major new Arctic trade route including icebreakers, warships and even an underwater drone.

“This is like launching the first rocket into space because it's a pilot project, the first in the world,” Vladimir Irimenko, senior engineer for environmental protection, said before showing journalists the reactor control room.