Monthly Highlights from the Russian Arctic, October 2024
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution and climate change.
News
Publish date: June 6, 2010
News
Before the 1990s, the Severka was used to move spent nuclear fuel in Soviet-produced shipping containers of the type TK-12 from Andreyeva Bay – the former naval base in the northwestern part of the Kola Peninsula – to a transshipment site in Murmansk dubbed Area SRZ-35. There, not far from the grounds of Atomflot, Russia’s nuclear fleet operator, the spent nuclear fuel was reloaded into railway cars to be shipped off to the reprocessing plant Mayak in the Urals.
The Severka was also equipped with special tanks for shipments of liquid radioactive waste.
Information about the Severka’s sinking appeared Monday in a Russian-language blog which said the vessel had gone under on May 24th while moored at a wharf operated by Shiprepairing Yard No. 10 in Alexandrovsk.
Alexandrovsk is a restricted-access area called in Russian by the acronym of ZATO, which stands for “closed administrative territorial entities” – or closed cities dealing with secretive scientific or military procedures.
Disturbingly, the location where the vessel, which is presumed to be still contaminated as a result of years of transporting spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste, reportedly sank is only 60 kilometres off the large city of Murmansk.
Both the management of the Alexandrovsk yard and Murmansk authorities decline to comment on the report. Likewise, no information has yet been offered by officials in the Northern Fleet.
The Severka was built in Hungary in 1957 and was later commissioned by the Northern Fleet. In 1978, its service as a support vessel was discontinued and it was retrofitted for the transportation of spent nuclear fuel from Andreyeva Bay to Murmansk. Since 1993, the Severka has been out of commission.
After years of various operations involving transportation and transshipment of spent nuclear fuel, the Severka itself now falls into the category of radioactive waste. According to data available, the most severely contaminated sections were, however, removed from the vessel by 2007.
“Now that this vessel has been scheduled for decommissioning, no [spent nuclear fuel] could be there, not according to any of the existing rules,” said Bellona Murmansk head Andrei Zolotkov.
The same, he said, happens with nuclear submarines, where spent nuclear fuel is first unloaded before the submarines are sent for dismantlement.
“Because the Severka was used for a long time to transport [spent nuclear fuel] in old containers, it is quite possible that there remain radioactively contaminated areas and equipment – or solid radioactive waste – on board the vessel. One could not rule out small quantities of low-level liquid radioactive waste, either. If the vessel did indeed sink, this is evidence of irresponsibility and negligence on the part of specialists in charge of decommissioning the Severka,” Zolotkov concluded.
Bellona is watching the situation for further developments and will be posting updates as they become available.
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution and climate change.
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
A visit last week by Vladimir Putin and a Kremlin entourage to Astana, Kazakhstan sought in part to put Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, on good footing with local officials.
Russia is formally withdrawing from a landmark environmental agreement that channeled billions in international funding to secure the Soviet nuclear legacy, leaving undone some of the most radioactively dangerous projects and burning one more bridge of potential cooperation with the West.