And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Source: http://www.insightmag.com/articles/story2.html Insight Magazine June 11, 1999 Russian Armada Poisons the Seas By Timothy W. Maier Junked Russian nuclear warships are leaching radioactive waste and spent fuel into the North Pacific fishing region. The Russians now want U.S. money to clean up their mess. Lurking in the frigid waters on the barren and sparsely populated North Pacific coast of the former Soviet Union lay half of the rotting and rusting hulks of a once- powerful and feared Russian armada, including submarines that ran silent and deep with arsenals for nuclear Armageddon. Despite the fall of the Evil Empire, the threat from these vessels of atomic death, combined with those rusting and leaking poisons in the Kola region, continues. Instead of instant annihilation, however, the new danger involves contamination of one of the most lucrative fishing regions of the world and, hence, food supplies for millions of people spanning the hemisphere from Japan to Alaska and along the coasts of Washington state and Oregon.. . . ."The concern here is whether the radiation fallout could travel into the Alaskan fishing current," says William L. Bell, vice president of the prestigious Center for Naval Analysis, or CNA, in Alexandria, Va., which has been seeking analysis by concerned intelligence agencies worried that even a single mishap could impact food supplies worldwide.. . . . In fact, a monthlong special investigation by Insight has uncovered not only unreported dangers associated with the decaying Russian Pacific and Northern fleets, but also new political threats from Moscow involving demands for millions of dollars in aid to help clean up this nuclear waste or else Russia's new masters simply will walk away from one of the most serious environmental hazards ever seen.. . . . Nuclear blackmail is not too strong a term. Russia desperately needs cash, and unless the United States delivers $160 million to build infrastructure to transport spent fuel from Northern and Pacific nuclear-submarine fleets, its leaders say they will violate every nuclear-disarmament treaty. The money would not include additional funds needed for environmental monitors, physical security or control. Nina Yanovskaya, who is in charge of this graveyard project for Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry in Moscow issued the threat recently at a high-level private seminar on nuclear waste held at CNA and attended by Insight. Cash-poor Russia can't afford to build the hundreds of sophisticated containers and technical equipment needed to store and move nuclear fuel that threatens both the northern and eastern Russian peninsulas, she says.. . . . n the past the United States characterized this as a regional problem, but new concern about ocean currents and wind direction as a result of the La Nina and El Nino phenomena has caught the eye of researchers wondering about the safety of Alaskan fishing waters. Most say Alaska is safe today but will give no guarantees for the future. "The biggest threat to Alaska is if you have another Chernobyl because the air patterns in the spring are a direct shot to Alaska," says David Garman, chief of staff for Sen. Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, who has kept an eye on the nuclear-submarine crisis. Westerners also are worried about the Kola Nuclear Power Plant near Murmansk, which safety experts liken to a car running on four flat tires because it has two 26-year-old pressurized water reactors, Garman says. Alaska missed the fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, but it may not be so lucky the next time. The combined radioactive level for both of the decaying fleets is 75 million curies, which translates into about 1.5 times the radioactivity released in the Chernobyl accident. One-third of this radioactivity is in the Far East. Since 1990 the problems with the junked Northern Fleet, near the Kola Peninsula, have been well documented. About 150 decommissioned submarines are in the region. Of those, 104 still have their nuclear fuel on board and, though reactor sections from another 33 have been cut out, the reactors remain afloat. In fact, 18 percent of all the nuclear reactors in the world are in the Kola Peninsula. The Kola region contains as many as 2,000 nuclear warheads and the old Soviet atomic fleet of eight icebreakers. Nuclear-powered warships and submarines sit decaying and polluting along with nuclear-powered lighthouses, nuclear-power plants and test sites.. . . . The Russians have denied all of this for years, even charging a former Russian naval captain, Alexander Nikitin, with treason for helping author a critical 1996 report with Bellona, a Norwegian environmental group, detailing dangers posed by the Northern Fleet. Now, however, the Russians admit the dire situation is a "Chernobyl in slow motion" that could harm a half-million residents in Murmansk alone, the country's most populated Arctic city. . . . . While the alarming state of the Northern Fleet has received international attention, the Pacific Fleet has not. Yanovskaya says that's a mistake because with 90 decaying nuclear submarines there threatening the environment it now is on par with the dangers in the north. . . . . "The radiation in the Far East is so bad that every four months the Security Council of the Russian Federation has to go there and have a meeting," Yanovskaya told a group of concerned scientists, researchers, Department of Energy officials and senior Navy officials at CNA's seminar. "We have seven submarines that need urgent attention. Four are located in the Far East." . . . . Each of these submarines contains two nuclear reactors, and each reactor has between 248 and 252 fuel assemblies. Spent fuel needs to be transported from the shipyards and bases to an "atomic train" and taken 2,000 miles across the Russian Federation to the Mayak reprocessing plant in the Ural Mountains. However, the fuel must cool off for a few years before it can be moved. . . . In the Far East alone, are some "236 defective canisters" of fuel, or open-lid containers, says Yanovskaya. Each contains seven nuclear-fuel assemblies. And "there are 273 assemblies which are not protected because there are no canisters," she says . . . . The Kola Peninsula storage facilities are jammed with spent-fuel assemblies. The largest is at Andreeva Bay, where there are 21,000 nuclear-fuel assemblies, comparable to 90 nuclear reactors. Most sit in concrete tanks that have been filled to capacity since 1990. Near Andreeva Bay, a storage tank leaked and some of the fuel assemblies dropped to the bottom of a cooling tank, inviting disaster. Sources familiar with these radiation problems tell Insight that the contamination is so bad that you actually can see a "radiation line" in the air. Moving this deadly material for reprocessing or disposal is a grim process. Fuel assemblies are loaded for shipping into bottle-shaped cases, which then are placed into a 44-ton, stainless-steel transport box with walls 12 inches thick. There is only one atomic train, which transports three of these boxes per trip and can take no more than 10 trips a year for both the Northern and Pacific Fleets. Jane's Navy International reports that the Northern and Pacific fleets have a total of 72,000 spent-fuel assemblies, which means it will take 50 years to transport all of the fuel from the dumps and vessel graveyards.. . . "I realize everything that has happened is the fault of Russia," Yanovskaya says. "It's our doing. The old Cold War is responsible for situation." But her tone quickly changes as she stresses the urgency for immediate funding to prevent another Chernobyl. "Either help us create the infrastructure or we will disrupt international agreements, and then it won't be only our fault." . . . . "That is blackmail!" warns Garman. "If you give money to Russia, you are helping them take care of a back end and freeing up resources for them to make more nuclear subs. Unless they are willing to forgo a navy, it's going to be tough love." . . .At the same time, Garman says, "Alaska views Russia as a neighbor. On one level you want to help and the United States has done so by working with Norway to help take care of low-level waste in Russia. " Since 1991 the United States has spent some $2.3 billion to pay for scrapping Russian submarines but neither Clinton nor Congress have offered to pay for infrastructure. Under the Cooperative Threat Reduction bill, five were decommissioned and four more are scheduled for decommissioning this year. But as of now there is no place to store the fuel. . . . . Garman notes that funding provided to Russia hasn't always gone where it should. An internal European Commission investigation found that hundreds of millions of British pounds, for instance, had been wasted on uncompleted projects designed to improve nuclear safety in Russia. "We are not going to subsidize the Russians' nuclear program," Garman says. "The last time I checked they were still building subs." And Russia won't forgo plans to build nuclear subs. As Yanovskaya says, "Russia will always be nuclear." But when it comes to nuclear safety, Moscow has a serious problem on its hands, as history suggests: In 1989, the Soviet nuclear submarine Komsomolets sank and now is rusting on the bottom of the Norwegian Sea with nuclear weapons and fuel that could threaten the Arctic fishing grounds. In 1990, an ecological disaster comparable to the Exxon Valdez oil spill killed 100,000 seals and millions of marine animals when rocket fuel leaked from a storage tank at the Soviet nuclear-submarine base at Severodvinsk. In 1993, the Kola Nuclear Power Station came close to a meltdown when backup power for its cooling system failed. In 1994, about 45 gallons of radioactive waste leaked from a storage drum containing liquid radioactive waste from scrapped nuclear submarines aboard an aging tanker in the Bay of Pavlosk. In 1998, a decommissioned nuclear submarine was struck by another vessel and sank in the Pacific East. The same year a Russian soldier on a nuclear-powered submarine killed a sentry and seven of his shipmates, threatening to detonate one of the submarine's torpedoes, before taking his own life as Russian special forces stormed the boat. . . . . Is the whole planet about to be poisoned? Not likely. Even when Russia was dumping nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan and other areas, Greenpeace ships tested those waters and found the contamination still was well below the recommended levels for evacuation or protective action, says Garman. General Accounting Office probes and studies by NATO and U.S. Naval Research all call the problem regional. "While there are scenarios such as [those involving] ocean currents where [contaminated] fish might migrate into U.S. waterways, most of the problems would be localized. We really don't expect to see a high risk to Alaska," Garman says. But what the public has not been told is that this testing did not cover the deep waters where sunken waste containers a few hundred feet below the surface could create a future environmental threat as they leak radioactive waste -- perhaps seriously affecting the fishing waters so dear to Alaska. And Adm. William Smith, a senior fellow at CNA who is knowledgeable about the problem, puts it this way: "If one of the ships develops a sizable leak, it will be measurable on our West Coast." . . . . If the waters are contaminated, "how safe will it be to eat Alaskan crab?" wonders Henry Gaffney Jr., a team leader at CNA. "It may be difficult to prove that fish are in danger, but the interest in potential environmental danger -- even to the Russians themselves -- is of great interest to us.... We need greater public awareness." That has been difficult since Russia and the United States often have kept under wraps the number of explosions in the Russian nuclear fleets. Yanovskaya dodged repeated questions concerning classified U.S. reports indicating a series of such explosions. A recent unpublished analysis prepared by Brookhaven National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy and obtained by Insight discusses these explosions. The report states that "five such accidents have occurred, twice during refueling operations." In 1985, during the refueling of an Echo II submarine in Chazhma Bay, near Vladivostok, control rods were not properly detached and were removed with the lid, causing a chain reaction and fire that killed 10 people and exposed several others to high doses of radiation. The accident "contaminated the marine environment and dispersed radioactive contamination to the local area via atmospheric transport." . . . . In the meantime, Yanovskaya put it bluntly, "If the U.S. offers no global help, we won't feel liable to a third country if anything happened." . . . With no check in hand and the Cold War over, a new environmental war could threaten the world's food supply. And unless somebody makes a move -- someone sooner or later will pay a deadly price. At press time, neither the White House nor the Russian Embassy had responded to Insight's request for comment. ~~~~~~ Reprinted under the fair use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
