- guardian.co.uk, Friday August 18 2000 01.48 BST
If the tragedy focuses attention on Russia's ballooning nuclear waste problem, then some good may yet come of it. What has been lacking has been political will in Russian and abroad. The loss of the Kursk could change that. There is still time - just.
From a radiation point of view, the Kola peninsula is one of the cleanest places in Europe. A bit of strontium 90 from the atmospheric atom bomb test of the 1950s, to be sure - you get that everywhere. On land, there is background radon (as on Dartmoor). In the Barents, Kara and White seas, there is caesium 137, but half of that comes from jolly old Windscale/Sellafield.
But Kola also boasts the greatest latent potential for catastrophic release of radioactivity on the planet. An audit of 1993, ordered by President Boris Yeltsin, opened the issue for scrutiny. Kola is home to huge numbers of operating and defunct reactors.
Between 1954 and 1996, the Soviet Union built 287 nuclear submarines, containing more than 500 reactors. Of these, a minimum of 183 - and perhaps as many as 245 - are now out of service, and at least 120 of those still have fuelled reactors. The Northern Fleet has 142 subs and three battlecruisers (300-plus reactors) in or out of service. Then there are 10 icebreakers and a container ship. In the tally are 16 dumped reactors, including six with unrecovered fuel from nuclear accidents, such as the one that overtook the icebreaker Lenin. To that must now be added the two fuelled reactors of the Kursk.
So Kola has an abundance of spent nuclear fuel from ships needing containment. Then there is the Kola power station. Two of its reactors are judged by the International Atomic Energy Authority to have a 25% likelihood of critical failure in the next 20 years. There is no containment. This, however, is the power station that powers the pumps that cool the shut-down submarine reactors that await decommissioning and disposal. When the electricity company cut the Russian navy off for non-payment a few years ago, marines appeared, submachine guns in hand, to help change its mind. A new Kola nuclear power station is planned.
There is no adequate technical provision to deal with this stuff. The main hope is the Russian 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 material from Kola by rail. A long-term repository is being discussed. The Russians want to put it on the island of Novaya Zemlya - but it is hard to reach and its geology is fractured by previous nuclear tests. Western experts favour a site on Kola, near the stuff. No early agreement is expected.
This situation is a product of the myopia that has been a characteristic of nuclear industries, west and east. They think in straight lines, and then only about the bits that they like, rather than of full-life cycles. Only now, with the armada of dead vessels swelling, is the Rubin Design Bureau, whose gifted engineers helped to build the Soviet submarine fleet (including, very recently, the Oscar design of the Kursk), being asked to un-design them.
Accommodation for spent fuel has been much reduced by accidents. Two storage ponds at the Andreyeva Bay naval facility had to be abandoned in 1982 because poor construction had led to leakage through cracked concrete and failed welds. The storage pool and dry dock at Gremikha failed too, for similar reasons. The Norwegian Bellona Foundation has evidence that drunkenness in the workforce prevented repair. Spent fuel is stored in Northern Fleet service tenders. Four (in Murmansk and Severodvinsk), are over 25 years old and full. With nowhere better to put the stuff, all these old, badly maintained barges are accidents waiting to happen. Spent fuel stands, inadequately shielded, on the quayside.
Like the brooms activated by the sorcerer's apprentice, the block decommissioning of the Soviet fleet is producing increasing volumes of fresh spent fuel. The Russian government plans to decommission 150 submarines by 2007. The present least-bad option is to leave the fuel in reactors on board. But left too long, fuel channels may distort. Defuelling then becomes impossible, so the entire reactors have to be disposed of. Unmaintained, the submarine hulls corrode. Some have sunk at their moorings.
The west wants to help. But at a recent meeting the cost of disposal quoted by the Russians was twice the equivalent western figure. The Russians would like to be paid to clean up; the west is reluctant to hand over cash. People recall the European Union auditors' report on money for safety at nuclear power-stations, which disappeared.
The whole issue is darkened by a cloud from another source - the inveterate culture of secrecy that hangs over Russian military, especially nuclear, matters. Of principal concern today is the case of a former Russian navy captain, Alexander Nikitin. The authorities decided to make an example of him. Put on trial for high treason for revealing information about the Russian navy (information that was actually already known to western researchers from other sources), he was hounded through the courts for years until he was acquitted by the St Petersburg city court last December.
The acquittal was confirmed by the supreme court in April, amid general rejoicing by environmentalists and supporters of free speech. But Victor Cherkesov, a friend of President Vladimir Putin, who was the Petersburg prosecutor and is now governor of north-west Russia, has not given up. The prosecutor's office has appealed against the acquittal and a supreme court hearing is due next month.
Even if his acquittal stands, Nikitin's case will have had dire consequences because of the nature of his defence case. The courts found that at the time of the offence, no law existed which Nikitin had broken: by definition he was innocent. Now there is a law. It works like this, in five 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 "public interest" defence. As a dissident in the new Russia told me, in future no prudent Russian will dare to speak publicly about any environmental issue except those that are wholly innocuous: perhaps the welfare of sea-birds.
The British government has offered £5m toward the Kola clean up. But any external aid must be targeted primarily at building a comprehensive partnership in which western and Russian engineers and equipment work together. 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.
• Gwyn Prins is principal research fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics.
Useful links:
The Bellona Foundation website is at www.bellona.no
