THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 19, 1996 TAG: 9610190223
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY FRED BARBASH, THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: MURMANSK, RUSSIA LENGTH: 122 lines
The region around Murmansk, the Kola Peninsula, contains without doubt the most dangerous concentration of nuclear hazards in the world, according to a recent study by the Norwegian environmental organization Bellona. For anyone who imagined that the atomic peril vanished with the Cold War and a few treaties, it is a ``must see.''
Anchored in the area's harbors is Russia's Northern Fleet - at least 70 idle nuclear-powered submarines, with reactors on board, fuel intact. In the event of fire, seismic calamity or technical error, they are a new kind of clear and present danger, says Bellona, which documented the region's troubles in extraordinary detail.
At military shipyards not far away lie the detritus of the Soviet Union's nuclear might: thousands of spent nuclear fuel assemblies, long cylinders once packed with uranium or thorium or plutonium isotopes.
In one open area, at Andreeva Bay, sit 32 metal containers of spent nuclear fuel extracted from nuclear warships and submarines during refueling operations. The containers are corroded, their lids are cracked, and water flows in and out.
At Polyarnyye Zori, 100 miles south of Murmansk, the nuclear power plant that provides 60 percent of the electricity for the region is considered one of the most dangerous in the world because of its poor containment capabilities - the same problem that helped precipitate the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine more than a decade ago when a reactor leaked.
At Novaya Zemlya, an island between the Barents and Kara seas, the Soviet Union carried out an estimated 40 atmospheric nuclear test explosions between 1957 and 1976, as well as 18 underground explosions.
And in the shipyard of the Murmansk Shipping Co. sits one of the most extraordinary little ships anywhere, the Lepse, with a tale as chilling as an arctic winter. A floating sarcophagus holds potential disaster
The executives, captains and crews of the Murmansk Shipping Co. can talk for hours about their days of glory, when nuclear icebreakers, such as the Arktika and the Rossiya, led great convoys of ships through vast seas of arctic ice, crushing all before them for the merchant fleet of the Soviet Union.
But the Rossiya, currently at dockside, is not the ship visitors want to hear about. Tell us, they say, of the Lepse, pointing to the black hull of the smaller ship, also tied up at the company's dockyard and representing the darker side of Russia's nuclear fleet.
The 60-year-old Lepse began collecting nuclear waste and used atomic fuel assemblies from Russia's fleet in the 1980s. Due to inadequate cooling in its holds, the spent fuel began expanding until it would no longer fit in its containers. To make it fit, workers bashed the containers with sledgehammers, crushing fuel assemblies with their blows and making them even more dangerous.
A portion of the ship was then encased in a concrete sarcophagus to prevent radiation leakage. It leaks anyway. The hull will not be safe for human contact for at least 200,000 years.
Although life and work go on around it, the ship is too hot to handle, too dangerous to move.
``Our technologies do not provide a way to extract it,'' said Vyacheslav Ruksha, vice president director of the Murmansk Shipping Co. ``It is the most complicated situation of waste and spent fuel in this region.''
Decades of dumping radioactive waste into the sea and several accidents A vast dumping ground of radioactive waste involving submarines and nuclear icebreakers have contributed to the area's troubles or, more precisely, potential troubles, for at the moment radiation levels in the region and its waters are said to be lower than, for example, the North Sea near Britain.
The potential troubles include, at worst, the possibility of reactor meltdowns, caused by fires or explosions, and at best, localized contamination caused by incompetent, reckless or substandard handling of solid and liquid nuclear waste.
The Murmansk region has the greatest concentration of nuclear reactors in the world, according to Bellona, with 18 percent of the world's total - 182 in operation and 135 no longer in use.
``The radioactivity dumped in this region constitutes approximately two-thirds of all radioactive waste ever dumped in the oceans of the world,'' a 1994 study by the organization said.
The region covers roughly 56,000 square miles and is home to 1.4 million people. Its nuclear development is a direct result of its strategic location - though 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the Barents Sea is ice-free because it is the terminus of the warm Gulf Stream. It was the Soviet Union's only port with unrestricted year-round access to the Atlantic. Arms treaty provisions have heightened the risks
The strategic arms reduction treaties signed by Russia and the United States have made the nuclear waste pile deeper. To comply with treaty provisions, the Russians have been cutting submarines in half to remove their missiles. They then weld them back together, badly, and refloat the vessels here.
With the Russian government in a major financial bind, no rescue is in sight for Murmansk. It is visited by a growing number of desperately worried experts from the neighboring nations of Norway and Sweden, by delegations from the European Union and the United States. Some bring money, some make promises of money, but nowhere near enough for a near-term prospect of relief.
Officials of the Murmansk regional government and of the shipping company feel helpless and abandoned. The central government in Moscow, which partially owns the shipping company, owes it millions of dollars, money that could be used to maintain the fleet of eight nuclear icebreakers and perhaps to improve its overwhelmed nuclear-waste treatment facility. The company, Ruksha said, is taking Moscow to court.
The Northern Fleet owes money to the electric company - so much that twice in September 1995 power briefly was cut off to the navy, an extraordinarily dangerous act since the cooling of the submarine reactors that keeps them relatively safe is dependent on the electricity supply. The fleet got the power turned on again when it sent armed guards to the electric company's premises.
And the troops who are supposed to be guarding and maintaining the nuclear fleet are getting fewer and fewer paychecks.
``We are very much concerned about the situation because we live here,'' said Vladimir Dorgan, chairman of the Murmansk region's Committee on Economic Analysis. ``The harbors have a minimum number of personnel to provide security. There are no state programs to destroy these reactors and to store them. There is no finance. Western aid is not sufficient.''
Dorgan believes treaties requiring missile dismantling were premature. The government should have waited until it could afford to implement them properly.
``Now,'' he said, ``we are the hostages.'' by CNB