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Bellona Nuclear Digest. November-December 2024
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
News
Publish date: March 1, 2006
News
Deputy Transportation Minister Alexander Misharin said that the 50 Years of Victory nuclear icebreaker was scheduled to be commissioned in October after passing sea trials in September.
The 159-meter (522ft) long and 30-meter (100ft) wide vessel, initially named the Urals, will be the world’s largest nuclear icebreaker, with a deadweight of 25,000 metric tons. An upgrade of the Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreaker, it is designed to break through ice up to 2.8 meters deep (9.2ft). Misharin said two diesel-powered icebreakers designed to assist navigation in the Baltic Sea were under construction. According to the official, Russia will need six to ten nuclear-powered icebreakers in the next twenty years, as the demand for icebreakers is rising with the development of the Arctic shelf.
"If we do not do anything, we will be left with one, at a maximum two, nuclear-powered icebreakers," Misharin said, adding that funds for the development of a new-generation icebreaker, to be commissioned after 2020, have already been allocated from the 2006 federal budget. The Russian nuclear-powered commercial fleet currently consists of five Arktika-class icebreakers (Arktika, Sibir, Rossiya, Sovetskiy Soyuz, and Yamal), two Taymyr-class river icebreakers (Taymyr and Vaygach), and the Sevmorput transport ship, reported RIA-Novosti.
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
A military drone with a high-explosive warhead struck the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine overnight, damaging a protective shelter that prevents radiation leaks at the plant’s destroyed fourth reactor unit, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Friday.
Russia has officially withdrawn from an international environmental agreement that brought to bear billions of dollars from EU nations and the United States on addressing the nuclear legacy of the Soviet Union.
This article by Angelina Davydova, editor of Bellona’s Ecology & Rights magazine, first appeared in The Moscow Times. The oil spill in ...