Radioactive Waste Waste 116 - Russian Nuclear Disposal Sites in Barents and Kara Seas Threatens Norway
I have blogged before about the mess that the Soviet military left in the Barents and Kara Seas off their north coast. They just dumped nuclear components, reactors, ships and submarines into the Seas. Now Norway, which borders on that area of what used to be the Soviet Union are worried about this toxic nuclear legacy.
The Soviet Union used the Barents and Kara Seas as nuclear dumping ground for its nuclear waste for decades. Russia continued the practice after the Soviet Union dissolved. The following items were disposed of in the two Seas.
19 ships that contained nuclear waste
14 ships with nuclear reactors (five still contained spent nuclear fuel)
735 pieces of heavy machinery that were radioactively contaminated
17,000 containers filled with radioactive waste
3 nuclear submarines with nuclear fuel in their reactors
The most dangerous of these are the submarines.
K-27 is the designation for an experimental nuclear sub launched in 1962. Its reactor started leaking radiation during a mission in 1968. Nine crewman were killed by the radiation and the rest of the crew suffered serious illnesses. In 1981, the K-27 was sunk in about a hundred feet of water, far shallower than the international rules for such disposal. The K-27 submarine could leak massive amounts of nuclear contamination into the Seas if the casings on its reactors fail.
The K-159 submarine was commissioned in 1963. Its entire propulsion system was contaminated with radiation after a coolant leak. They kept repairing it until it was taken out of service 1989. By 2003, its hull was so badly rusted that pontoons had to welded to the sub to keep it from sinking. IN 2003, they tried to sail it to a disposal site but during a storm, one of the pontoons broke away and it sank just sixty miles from the Norwegian border. This wreck contains seventeen hundred pounds of nuclear fuel and poses the greatest threat to Norway.
The Bellona Foundation, an international environmental NGO based in Oslo, Norway, has been lobbying for action on dealing with this nuclear waste from Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. They issued an important report in 1994 with the title "Sources of Radioactive Contamination in Murmansk and Archangel Counties" to alert the world to the dangers posed by decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarines.
The Chief Executive of the Bellona Foundation said in a recent interview with the Dagbladet newspaper that the wreckage of the old ships and submarines could start leaking radioactive waste into the Seas within the next ten to fifteen years. This could impact important industries like fishing off the north coast of Norway.
One complication in making progress in this situation is the fact that relations between Russia and Western Europe have recently soured over the Russian annexation of the Crimea and support for rebel factions in eastern Ukraine. Last December, Russia cancelled the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program which it had signed with the United States Department of Defense in order to prevent the leakage of radiation from their undersea nuclear waste dump.
All the major nuclear power have followed the same practice of totally ignoring environmental concerns while developing their nuclear weapons. In the U.S., decades after the end of weapons production, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is still one of the most radioactively contaminated places on the planet. The British are still trying to clean up Sellafield. The legacy of the Cold War arms race lives on and threatens lives.
K-159 Russian nuclear submarine:
