Russian nuclear subs: meltdown danger
By Renfrey Clarke MOSCOW — At a naval base in the Russian Arctic, decommissioned nuclear submarines lie rusting next to the wharves. Their reactors still contain fuel rods, which emit significant amounts of heat. Power cables connect on-board cooling systems to the base electricity supply. Then, because of unpaid bills, the regional electricity company cuts off power to the base. What happens next? The answer may well be a perilous fiasco of the type which on September 21 may or may not have allowed a reactor to overheat on one of four submarines at the Gadzhievo naval base, near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula. Subsequently, troops with weapons drawn may or may not have forced the personnel of an electricity substation to reconnect the base to the power grid. Military secrecy has obscured many details, but power to the Gadzhievo base was cut off for nearly an hour, and troops sent by the navy later seized control of electrical installations on the Kola Peninsula and in Arkhangelsk province. On September 23 Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin banned further cut-offs to military facilities. The incident has highlighted the dangers created by the government's failure to stop the decay of nuclear-powered warships. The events also raised the prospect that the Russian armed forces may become confirmed in the habit of solving their problems by turning their weapons on other sectors of society. The Soviet and now Russian Navy, with more than 100 nuclear-powered warships, has a long history of nuclear accidents and releases of radioactivity into the environment. A Greenpeace Russia report in October 1994 stated that between 1956 and 1994 about 10% of the nuclear submarine fleet had to be written off because of catastrophic malfunctions. The record includes 140 "incidents" and 30 more serious "accidents", which killed at least 520 sailors. The navy's provisions for dealing with radioactive wastes have never been adequate, and liquid wastes continue to be dumped at sea. Solid wastes have routinely been left on decommissioned warships. According to Greenpeace, the number of decommissioned nuclear submarines is now about 150, and the nuclear fuel has been removed from no more than 40 of them. In some cases, submarines have been rotting at their moorings for 15 years, their reactors still full of highly radioactive materials. The situation has grown dramatically worse in the last few years. With justification, Russian governments since 1991 have made the military a prime target in their efforts to limit state spending and reduce budget deficits. But this "downsizing" of the armed forces has not been planned or consistent. The cuts have tended to be concentrated in sections of the military that are ill placed to wage a counter-offensive within the bureaucracy. The navy's Northern Fleet, remote from the capital and irrelevant to such preoccupations as the war in Chechnya, has not fared well. Senior fleet officers recently claimed that funding was short by 600 billion roubles (about US$130 million). In these circumstances, the fleet has been unable to keep much of its equipment in working order. John Large, a British consulting engineer who visited the fleet's main bases in March, reportedly observed: "What we are seeing is the technological resources of the Northern Fleet crumbling, and the fleet being incapable of taking care of it". The fleet has not had the luxury of choosing
whether to compromise on safety. Rather, it has been forced to choose where it should take chances. One decision has been to put off paying electricity bills. At the time of the cut-off, the Kola Peninsula electricity firm Kolenergo claimed that the fleet owed it 20 billion roubles (US$4.5 million). As electricity generating authorities have been privatised, they have begun aggressively punishing debtors by cutting off power. In September last year, power supplies were cut to the central command post of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Numerous power cuts to other military installations have followed. The government issued a directive on July 27 making clear that power companies had the right to cut electricity supplies to military bases that had not paid their bills. After power supplies were cut at Gadzhievo on September 21, generators on the submarines were started up. According to the news service Itar-Tass, this backup system failed on at least one of the subs. The news agency reported that a reactor then overheated, posing the threat of a meltdown that could have contaminated much of Scandinavia. However, a navy spokesperson later insisted that all the equipment on board the subs had functioned "perfectly". According to the fleet press office, the commander of the base telephoned the local power station, and power was restored without the military intervening further. This version was confirmed by Kolenergo, but contradicted by Itar-Tass. The news agency stated that heavily armed troops were used to force the resumption of power supplies, bursting into a substation and compelling the duty engineer to turn the current back on. If no danger of a nuclear catastrophe arose at Gadzhievo on September 21, the actions of the fleet authorities next day seem curiously out of proportion. On September 22 the commander of the Northern Fleet, Admiral Oleg Yerofeyev, sent troops to seize control of other electricity company installations. Commanders of units in the region were ordered to "take all necessary action to prevent power and heating being cut off again, including the use of weapons if necessary". Whether inspired by fear or by a wish to dramatise the plight of the fleet, Yerofeyev's moves soon scored results. A report on September 23 stated that the Defence Ministry had promised funds to allow the fleet's electricity bill to be paid promptly. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, despite his earlier move permitting blackouts of military installations, described the cut-off at Gadzhievo as "irresponsible and unacceptable to the government". Further cut-offs to military facilities were "categorically banned". However, the government still has made no serious commitment to finding ways to deal with the "floating Chernobyls" moored in naval bases around the Russian coast. Political commentators, meanwhile, are pointing to the danger that the precedent established by the commander of the Northern Fleet on September 22 will be taken up by other senior military officers. There are now times when commanders are unable even to feed enlisted personnel, and the Moscow daily
Segodnya on September 26 quoted a "high-placed military representative" as predicting "an explosion of social conflicts" if the pay of officers was not increased. Previously without a tradition of independent intervention in social and political struggles, the Russian armed forces may be acquiring a new vocation.