Nuclear cemetery: Soviet radioactive waste on New Earth continues to scare

According to the Norwegian Bellon Foundation, which investigates climate change and threats to the environment, Russian scientists have estimated that radioactive waste sunk in the New Earth archipelago area remains tight and no leak sites have been found for the Barents and Karski seas. However, they will influence the government in the Russian Federation to further finance the observation of the submarine nuclear cemetery.

The latest information on distributed cargo, covering several thousand radioactive waste containers as well as a complete submarine, comes from a one-and-a-half-month expedition to the Canary Sea, conducted by the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The head of the institute said that the expeditions had succeeded in significantly improving and detailing the maps of sites of flooded hazardous waste, especially in the New Earth archipelago area, where nuclear ground operations began since 1954: Chornaja Guba, Matochkin Shar and Dry Nose. From the rocky coast of New Earth, the expedition carried out additional studies mapping radioactive hazards in the White Sea, and then influenced the Sea of Laptievs over a distance of about 2,000 nautical miles eastward. Since the first decade of the current century, mapping and measuring expeditions have been held annually. Ecologists fear that freed waste could completely destroy thousands of square miles of rich Arctic fisheries.

From 1955 to the 1990s, Soviet Polish Navy It discarded huge amounts of irradiated waste, mainly fuel-related to submarine nuclear reactors. In one case, an entire nuclear submarine was sunk in the Gulf of Stepov! It is the K-27 of project 645, a unique unit, for the first time in the USSR fleet equipped with two nuclear reactors cooled by a liquid alloy of lead and bismuth. In May 1968, this gym collapsed and nine sailors died. The ship was placed "on string" in Gremich Bay, where he spent... 13 years, during which its reactors were cooled from land.

In 1981, it was decided to get rid of the problem, in the simplest and cheapest way – through its sinking. The compartments of the gym were flooded with a clotting mixture of furfuryl alcohol and bitumen to seal it and prevent dangerous substances from leaking to the sea. However, time does its own and the risk of failure increases. It was not until 2011 that the Russian government formally admitted to this fact at international level. It was then that Moscow shared with the Norwegian nuclear offices that dealt with the full scope of the problem.

The list of sunk facilities was much larger than initially thought and included 17,000 radioactive waste containers, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including 5 still containing spent nuclear fuel, the K-27 mentioned with two reactors filled with nuclear fuel and 735 other radioactively contaminated heavy containers. Since 2012, Moscow has routinely promised to lift the submarine from the bottom and dispose of it safely, but these plans have still failed to materialise it.

Written by KB