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Recently I blogged about a fire on a Russian experimental submersible that killed fourteen Russian sailors. The Russians delayed announcing the fire and deaths for days and there are still a lot of unanswered questions about exactly what happened. The Soviet Union before its collapse and the Russian government after the collapse have always been sloppy with the handling of nuclear materials and closed mouth about accidents, especially related to nuclear weapons. Now another strange occurrence in Russia appears to be following the same pattern.
On August 8th of this year, five people were killed and three sustained severe burns following the explosion of a rocket engine on an arctic navel test range at Nyonoksa in Russia. The state nuclear company, Rosatom, confirmed that the explosion had taken place. Rosatom said that the explosion happened during tests of a new liquid propellant rocket engine. The announcement from Rosatom said that they had been working on the “isotope power source” for the propulsion system.
The Nyonoksa test site has carried out tests for just able every missile system used by the Russian navy. This includes sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, Cruise missiles and anti-aircraft missiles.
Authorities in Severodvinsk which is about thirty miles east of Nyonoksa reported on a website that just after the blast, the radiation levels were much higher than normal for about forty minutes after which they returned to normal. The radiation level jumped to two microsieverts per hour and then fell back to a tenth of a microsievert which is the normal background level. Authorities said that the higher level was not a threat to the public. The online post reporting on the radiation spike was removed from the website the next day and the Russian government said that national security was involved.
People living in Severodvinsk and nearby Archangelsk rushed out and bought up all the available stocks of medical iodine to counteract possible threats from the radiation. Emergency responders who evacuated the burn victims from the test site wore chemical and nuclear protection suits.
Nuclear experts in the U.S. are now saying that they think that the explosion and radiation release may have happened during the test of a nuclear-powered cruise missile. The President of Russia bragged about this missile last year. They call their nuclear cruise missile the 9M730 Buresvestnik. The NATO alliance refers to it as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall.
Two different U.S. nuclear experts stated that the claimed test of a liquid propellant rocked engine would not have caused a spike in radiation. An adjunct senior fellow with the Federation of American Scientists said, “Liquid fuel missile engines exploding do not give off radiation, and we know that the Russians are working on some kind of nuclear propulsion for a cruise missile.”
A senior U.S. administration official would not confirm or deny that the explosion was caused by the testing of a nuclear cruise missile but he was highly skeptical of the Russian explanation for the explosion and radiation spike. He said, "We continue to monitor the events in the Russian far north but Moscow's assurances that 'everything is normal' ring hollow to us. This reminds us of a string of incidents dating back to Chernobyl that call into question whether the Kremlin prioritizes the welfare of the Russian people above maintaining its own grip on power and its control over weak corruption streams.”
Satellite photos and other intelligence indicate that the Russians dismantled a nuclear cruise missile test facility in Novaya Zemlya and moved the components to Nyonoksa where it was reassembled. The Serebryanka, a Russian ship that is used to recover nuclear propulsion units from the sea floor, was anchored off the coast near Nyonoksa at the time of the explosion. A nautical exclusion zone was established a month before the explosion and only the Serebryanka was inside that zone.
The U.S. considered the idea of a nuclear power cruise missile in the 1950s and ultimately rejected the concept because such a missile would spew radioactive materials along its entire flight path posing a threat to the nation which launched it as well as the intended target.