"Underwater Chernobyl": At the bottom of the Arctic, Russian atomic submarines rot
On the seabed, there are two atomic submarines K-27 and K-159 and four reactor modules, writes for 19Fotyfive, a defense expert and weapons, a former Pentagon consultant and several NATO governments Ruben F. Johnson. For 17 years, Moscow promised that this "underwater grave" would be purified, but only in March 2020 Russian President Vladimir Putin prepared a federal decree for a project to lift two submarines.
This would reduce the amount of radioactive materials in the Arctic Ocean by 90 percent. These two atomic submarines contain one million Curie radiation, which is equivalent to 25% of the radiation ejected for the first month of nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima in Japan. "It is not surprising that these two submarines have been called" delayed "Chernobyl of Russia in the sea.
But this is a catastrophe that has been going on for a long time and continues to deteriorate," - says the military consultant. One of the unpleasant problems of the post -Soviet period was the number of atomic submarines that were still in order but needed writing off. During the Cold War, the US and the USSR built more than 400 atomic submarines.
There were so many because these vessels were considered by both countries as an integral part of their defensive position and were strategic necessity. Until the 1990s, a considerable number of these boats had to be written off, but the correct decommissioning and disposal became an insoluble problem that Russia could not cope with economically.
Russia has dismantled its fleet in international cooperation, but in recent years these efforts have stacked through the war in Ukraine, the expert emphasizes. Western countries did not want to finance the program for the disposal of outdated atomic ships of Russia, while Moscow spent billions of war. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has estimated that the operation to raise the two submarine from the bottom of the Arctic will cost more than 300 million euros, Johnson writes.
However, as a result of the war, the EBRD curtailed this program, and the Russians, faced with the prospect of financing the whole project on their own, put it in a "long box". In addition to the unwillingness to pay for the bottom of radioactive waste on its own, in Russia there are simply no technologies for conducting such complex operations. After the catastrophe of the submarine "Kursk" in 2001 the Dutch rescue vessel raised it to the surface, not the Russians.