Container Ships, Polar Express, and Arctic Hectare

Rosatom has announced plans to build four icebreaking container ships for the prospective Arctic shipping line connecting Europe and South-East Asia through the Northern Sea Route. According to the company’s management, their concept design has already been developed. These LNG-powered container vessels will have the capacity of 6,000 TEU and be able to break ice up to 2.76 meters thick. The ships are expected to be delivered to Rosatom by 2025.

The process of laying Polar Express, the Arctic submarine fiber-optic cable to connect the cities of Murmansk and Vladivostok, has started recently, Russian authorities say. This 12,650 kilometer armored cable will be able to transfer up to 100 terabits of data per second across the Arctic Ocean providing reliable access to the Internet for port cities and remote communities in the Russian Arctic and Far East. The active construction phase of the project will be complete in 2026.

The Murmansk regional government has allocated more than 730,000 hectares of land, or about 5 per cent of the region’s total territory, for the purposes of the Arctic Hectare program to kick off this 1 August. The program enables any local resident of the Russian Arctic to acquire, free of charge, a one-hectare-sized public-owned land plot to build a house or launch a business project there. The available plots can be seen on an online map.