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Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
The Losharik was being prepared for a North Atlantic deployment when the accident occurred. A top Russian naval officer said that the fourteen men who died on the Losharik on July 1st prevented a “planetary catastrophe. The comment was made at the funeral for the men. Captain Sergei Pavlov is an aide to the commander of Russia’s navy. Pavlov praised the men as heros. He said that they died as they fought the fire to stop it from spreading in the submersible. He said, “With their lives, they saved the lives of their colleagues, saved the vessel and prevented a planetary catastrophe.”
Dmitry Peskov is a Kremlin spokesman. He said that he did not know of the comments by Captain Pavlov at the funeral for the men who died in the submersible. He stated that he was not aware of any broader threat to the world that might have been posed by the fire on the submersible. He told reporters in a conference call that there was no problem with the reactor on the Losharik.
Russia did not make the incident on the Losharik public until July 4th, three days after the incident took place. The Russians confirmed that the submersible was nuclear powered. It was also reported that the Russian Defense Minister told Russian President Putin that the nuclear reactor on the Losharik was completely sealed off when the fire broke out.
Previously to their public announcement, the Russian government would not say on what vessel the incident occurred or whether or not the vessel was nuclear powered. The Norwegians tried to get more details from the Russians but they said that no increased radiation had been detected in the area where the accident took place.
The fire aboard the Losharik is the most serious Russian navel incident since twenty sailors died on a Nerpa nuclear submarine in 2008. The worst Russian naval disaster after the fall of the Soviet Union took place in August of 2000. One hundred and eighteen crew members died when the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea after an explosion onboard.
Norway has just announced that they have detected very high radiation levels around the wreckage of the Russian Komsomolets nuclear submarine which sank in 1989 after a fire broke out. Forty-two sailors died in that accident.
The Soviets were very sloppy with their nuclear power fleet. The bottom of the Barents Sea is littered with wreckage and decommission nuclear reactors from submarines. In one case, an entire nuclear submarine with its reactor still containing fuel was sunk in the Barents Sea. In the past few years, the Russian Navy has added to the nuclear mess in the Barents Sea. They recently notified Norway that leaking radioactive materials may pollute Norwegian fishing grounds.
The Russians and the Soviet Union before them have a bad record of delaying the release of information about major nuclear accidents in Russia and in the world’s oceans. And when they have released information it may be false or incomplete.
(Image - By Heribeto Arribas Abato - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80236803)