CORRECTION: The MarineLink report this was based on, and the virtually identical report at gCaptain, is misleading. The town, Pevek, population less than 5,000, is not “across the Bering Strait from Alaska.” It is on the North coast of Siberia. The entire region, Chukotka, has a population of about 50,000. The Russian town on Bering Strait is Uelen, population about 720.
An interesting note from MarineLink. The Russians are deploying a floating nuclear power plant to a small community, the town of Pevek, on their side of the Bering Strait, 53 miles (86 km) from Alaska.
Greenpeace is concerned.
“Nuclear reactors bobbing around the Arctic Ocean will pose a shockingly obvious threat to a fragile environment which is already under enormous pressure from climate change,” Jan Haverkamp, nuclear expert for Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, said in a statement last month.
Chuck Hill's CG Blog 
With a Population of ~5,000 people! Why would they need a Nuclear Reactor?
Did you forget a zero from the distance?
Thanks
I believe the total population served is close to 50,000. The design is similar to the power plants used on the nuclear icebreakers, so they should have experience with the design and had time to make it reliable. The construction was done in an area that was used to fabricating large things.
The KLT-40S reactor in the floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov is a derivative of the KLT-40/KLT-40M reactors used in two nuclear-powered icebreakers (Taymyr and Vaygach) and the nuclear-powered cargo ship (Sevmorput). Lomonosov was built at Baltic Shipyard which has built the majority of Russia’s nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet and currently building three new ones.
I don’t really see any technology risk here. In fact, many people seem to forget the fact that Pevek is currently served by the world’s northernmost nuclear power plant, Bilibino. This power plant, commissioned in the 1970s, has four EGP-6 reactors which are scaled-down versions of the Soviet RBMK reactor. I probably won’t have to explain why one of the RBMK reactors is listed as “destroyed” in Wikipedia…
Here’s a pretty nice description of the technology:
Click to access 25.KLT-40S.pdf
Check out the correction above.