15 Russian nuclear reactors dumped at sea
LONDON — Greenpeace on February 27 confirmed that 12 submarine nuclear reactors and three icebreaker reactors have been dumped in the waters off the coast of Novaya Zemlya. This is the first public disclosure that Russian submarines and their nuclear reactors were dumped in the Kara Sea.
One whole submarine, the K-27, powered by a liquid-metal cooled reactor, was dumped in the Stepovov Gulf after an accident in May 1968. Its two fuelled nuclear reactors were dumped in the same location off the southern island in 1982.
Eight reactors, three of which still contain their nuclear fuel, were dumped with sections of four accident-damaged nuclear submarines in waters just south of the K-27. The submarine sections — from the K-11, K-3 Leninski Komsomol, K-19 Hiroshima, and one unknown — were reportedly dumped during the years 1964-65.
Five more reactors litter the seabed, including the three damaged reactors from the icebreaker Lenin. More than 17,000 containers of liquid and solid radioactive waste were also dumped; the location of some 10,000 of these containers has now been made public.
Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Circle used as a nuclear test site, is proving to be one of the largest nuclear dumping grounds. The information comes from sources inside the Commonwealth of Independent States, researched by Alexander Yemelanenkov, Russian chairman of the anti-testing association Towards Novaya Zemlya, and Andrei Zolotkov, a nuclear engineer aboard the Imandra, a nuclear refuelling ship for icebreakers in Murmansk.
"The waste from the nuclear icebreakers is a molehill compared to the mountain of waste created by the Russian nuclear navy", said John Sprange, Greenpeace disarmament campaigner. "This is the beginning of an uncontrolled landslide."
[Greepnpeace/Pegasus]