Nuclear Disaster May Still Be Averted
[revised after the loss of the Kursk]
By Gwyn Prins
EDITOR'S NOTE: Gwyn Prins is Principal Research Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics. He participated in the Pugwash workshop on Soviet nuclear waste disposal issues in North-West Russia.
THIS week, before the horrified gaze of world attention, the Kursk has moved from the shrinking operational to the swelling dead armada of Russian nuclear submarines, most of which are to be found in the Kola Peninsula of North-West Russia. If the tragedy can serve to focus attention upon the wider context of Russia's ballooning nuclear waste problem, then some good may yet come from it. What has been lacking hitherto has been political will in Russia and abroad. The loss of the Kursk could change that. There is still time - just.
In a comprehensive review of radioactive sources in the Kola/Barents region, the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOA), concluded that the Kola Peninsula in North-West Russia currently offers one of the cleanest options in Europe. A bit of Strontium 90 from the atmospheric atom bomb test of the 1950s, to be sure; you get that everywhere. But basically, on land, there is background radon (like Dartmoor), and, insofar as there is radioactivity in the Barents, Kara and White seas, it is Caesium 137 - and over 50% of it comes advected up on the ocean currents from Sellafield - the British nuclear reprocessing plant.
Now for the worrying news. The Kola Peninsula also boasts the greatest concentration of latent potential for catastrophic release of radioactivity on the planet. The courageous Yablokov "White Book" audit of 1993, ordered by President Yeltsin, opened the issue for scrutiny. There are more operating and defunct reactors sited here than anywhere else (178 and above 140 [the Yablokov figure], respectively). The USSR built 287 nuclear submarines, containing over 500 reactors, between 1954-1996, of which a minimum of 183 and perhaps as many as 245 are now out of service. Of those, at least 120 still have fuelled reactors. The Northern Fleet has 142 subs and 3 battle-cruisers (300 plus reactors) in or out of service. Then there are ten ice-breakers and a container ship. The tally known now counts, in addition to the queue of superannuated nuclear submarines and other ships awaiting disposal, 16 dumped reactors, including 6 with unrecovered fuel from nuclear accidents, such as overtook the icebreaker Lenin. To that must now be added the two fuelled reactors of the Kursk. Then there is an overflowing abundance of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) needing containment, of which 10% is damaged (Yablokov counted 30,000 assemblies containing 2.3 million curies of radioactivity in 1993). Then there is the Kola power station.
Of its four unshielded VVER 440/230 and 440/213 type reactors, the older pair (440/230) are judged by the IAEA to have a 25% likelihood of critical failure in the next 20 years. This is the power station which powers the pumps that cool the shut-down submarine reactors that await decommissioning and disposal. When the utility company cut the Navy off for non-payment of bills a few years ago, Marines with balaclavas and sub-machine guns appeared to help change its mind. A new Kola station is planned. In the FOA risk ladder, the current Kola station comes top (in red letters), followed by a refuelling accident with current submarines, the masses of ill-contained or audited SNF and then the armada of dead submarines.
Now for the bad news. First, there is no adequate technical provision present or planned to deal with this stuff. The main hope is the reprocessing plant at Mayak near Chelyabinsk, with western-funded medium-term storage under construction there. However, shortage of special rolling stock restricts the capacity to move SNF to Mayak to about 12 cores-worth per year. A long-term repository is still at the discussion stage: the Russians want to put it on the island of Novaya Zemlya - hard to reach and its geology well fractured by scores of underground nuclear tests; the western experts favour a site on the Kola, near the stuff. No early agreement may be expected.
This situation is directly a product of the segmented, sequential myopia which has been a general characteristic of nuclear industries. They tend to think in straight lines, and then only about the bits that they like, rather than of full-life cycles, unless forced to do so. Only now, with the dead armada swelling, is the Rubin Design Bureau, whose gifted engineers helped to build the Soviet submarine fleet (including the Oscar II design of the Kursk), being asked to un-design them: this work has been given to the Nuclear Special Purpose Submarine Department under Yevgeni Gorigledzhan.
Secondly, such short-term provision for storage of SNF as has been built has been much reduced by past accidents which only came to light in the Yablokov report. Two storage ponds in Building 5 at the Murmansk naval facility at Andreyeva Bay had to be abandoned in 1982 because poor construction had led to huge leakage: cracked concrete; failed welds. It wasn't helped by dropping fuel rods (120 in total) onto the pond floor. V. Bulygin was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for leading its retrieval. Today, Building 5 can only be approached in a goon suit. The storage pool and Dry Dock SD-10 constructed at Gremikha, failed too, for similar reasons. The Bellona Foundation has evidence that drunkenness in the work-force prevented repair. So SNF has been left in TK-11 and TK-12 type transit flasks; but they leaked. (New ones [TUK-18] are being made, but the design is criticised.) Or in the 11 Northern Fleet service tenders. Four (in Murmansk and Severodvinsk) give special cause for concern, being over 25 years old and filled to capacity. One, the Lepse in Murmansk harbour, is so contaminated that it is singled out by FOA as a prime risk, and is now to be tackled by a French consortium. But with nowhere better to put the stuff, all these old, badly maintained barges are candidates for future accidental releases. Replacements of the Type 2020 "Malina" class are slow in building for lack of funds. Much SNF stands, inadequately shielded, on the quay-side - 700 fuel assemblies in 110 defective TK-11 containers at Gremikha, for over 30 years, for example.
The block decommissioning of the Soviet fleet is producing increasing volumes of fresh SNF, at least 30 cores-worth a year, like the brooms activated by the sorcerer's apprentice. The government is committed to decommissioning 150 submarines by 2007. The present least-bad option appears to be to leave the fuel in the shut-down reactors, in the hulks. But left too long, the fuel channels in the reactors may distort and defuelling become impossible, making it necessary to dispose of fuelled reactors. Also, unmaintained, the submarine hulls corrode and some have sunk at their moorings, needing then to be salvaged and propped up with pontoons. Minatom reports 30 to be at imminent risk of sinking. 17 "November" and "Victor" class hulks at Gremikha are too dangerous to tow.
Now for the worst news. There is low confidence in Russian costings. Obviously, the West wants to help; but at a recent meeting, the dollar figure per cubic metre for disposal of Russian waste that was quoted was twice the equivalent western cost. The Russians would like to be paid to clean up; the West is increasingly reluctant to hand over cash, with reason. People recall IMF funds ending up in the Bank of America, or the EU Auditors' report on related nuclear power-station safety funding, which disappeared entirely from view. Technicians and kit could be provided: but the Russians are affronted. Stalemate. Furthermore, the regulatory authority for environmental protection has recently passed to the Ministry of Natural Resources, which more usually looks for new mining possibilities.
But possibly most ominous has been the acquittal on a charge of high treason of Capt. Alexander Nikitin. Put on trial for revealing details of the Soviet Navy, he was acquitted by the City Court of St Petersburg on 29 December 1999. The acquittal was confirmed by the Supreme Court on 17 April 2000, amid general rejoicing by environmentalists and supporters of free speech. But Victor Cherkesov, a friend of Mr Putin, who was the Petersburg Prosecutor and is now Governor of North-West Russia, wouldn't give up. The Prosecutor's office has appealed against the acquittal. On 2 August, the Supreme Court in Moscow postponed the hearing to 13 September, on the grounds that the judge had been on holiday and was ill-prepared. While acquittal is obviously just, and to be demanded in Nikitin's case, as President Clinton has just done, the consequence of the grounds of acquittal - assuming that it stands - is dire.
The courts found that, at the time of the offence, no law existed which Nikitin had broken: so, by definition, he was innocent. Now there is a law. It works like this, in five easy, Kafkaesque, steps: One - there are secret matters not to be revealed; two - they are listed; three - the list itself is secret; four - ignorance is no defence; five - there is no concept of "public interest" defence. Back to the future. So, as a leading dissident (we use this language again, regretfully) explained to me, no prudent Russian will dare to speak publicly about any environmental issue except the welfare of sea-birds. The onus is back on westerners, led by the Bellona Foundation of Norway.
The British government wants to help. £5m is offered. When the Consul-General visited Murmansk, following the Foreign Secretary's visit, he was strongly urged to fund use of the Murmansk Shipping Company's nuclear fuel support ship Imandra (which does work) to defuel old nuclear attack submarines. The company conducted a successful demonstration on a 1975 vintage Victor II boat last December. That might be sensible; it is analogous to the French project on the Lepse.
It is a start. But the full picture tells that any and all external aid must be targeted primarily at building a comprehensive partnership within which western and Russian engineers and equipment work together, in harness. Requirements of general security insist on this. Compromise is unacceptable, because the safe management of radioactivity is an activity unlike any other. That a British rescue team was requested, late in the day, to assist with the Kursk, is one glimmering point of optimism that may be seen as the swirling, murky, waters close over the disaster.
Useful links:
Main sources:
T. Nilsen, I. Kudrik & A. Nikitin, 'The Russian Northern Fleet: sources of radioactive contamination', 1996, Oslo, Noway (to be found on the Bellona website)
R. Bergman & A. Baklanov, Radioactive sources of main radiological concern in the Kola-Barents region, 1998, Swedish Council for Planning & Coordination of Research (FRN)/Defence Research Establishment (FOA)
A. Diakov et al., 'Nuclear Powered Submarine Inactivation and Disposal in the U.S. and Russia: A Comparative Analysis', Problems of Material Science, 1997, 2(8): 37-44
A. Yemelyanenkov & A. Zolotkov, 'Sailing Directions Classified: a review of radioactive wastes the former USSR dumped in Arctic and Far Eastern seas', Atom Declassified: Half a Century with the Bomb, Moscow, IIPPNW, 1996
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