Russia’s Floating Arctic Chernobyls
I must have been down with the flu or sailing up the coast of Burma, but somehow I missed the story when it first came out. When I finally ran across a 2009 article from The Observer while doing research on the Arctic a couple of weeks ago, the story struck me as somewhere between hilarious and calamitous. Its opening sentence read, “Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves.” This would not have been alarming news if the Norwegians were doing it, but when the Russians are building nuclear power stations in the middle of the Arctic, it causes a lot of concern — particularly considering the fact that they have historically equated caution with cowardice.
But wait — it gets worse. The prototype station, the Akademik Lomonosov, has been pronounced perfectly safe by Andrei Fomichev, the head of the St. Petersburg shipyard that is building it. In a Reuters story titled “Can Nuclear Power Plants Float?” Fomichev said: “All possible emergency situations have been tested. Safety testing began under the Soviet Union.” Now that’s reassuring. Nobody could have been more safety conscious than the Soviet Union, which tested 138 nuclear weapons in the Arctic from 1955 to 1990. During this period, it dumped 14 nuclear reactors into the Arctic seas and scuttled close to 20 submarines, sometimes in only 30 meters of water when international conventions require 3,000 meters.
In fact, the Soviet radioactive legacy may even pose a greater threat to the Arctic than the floating nuclear power plants. The environmental group Bellona cites a Russian Academy of Sciences study that says, “When drill bits hit the ocean floor, there is a danger of disinterring a vast portion of the Soviet Union’s irresponsible nuclear legacy, which threatens to contaminate at least a quarter of the world’s Arctic coastline.”
But floating nuclear power plants are hazardous enough and still preventable. James Brooke, in a Voice of America column from Dec. 22, 2011, chronicles the Kolskaya oil rig disaster. It was being towed back to port two months after the end of the safe deadline for towing rigs. The captain called his wife saying “the mission was suicidal.” The rig was carrying 67 people, most of whom were not needed aboard. The rig capsized, and nearly everyone on board died. This also highlighted the inadequacy of Russian rescue capabilities, an essential ingredient of any serious Arctic exploitation program.