Takes radioactive threat out of the water

Rusty retired submarines and reactor compartments floating along Russia’s Arctic coast of the Kola Peninsula will soon be history. Today, almost all of the Cold War submarines taken out of operation are decommissioned, but still; many of the reactor compartments are floating at naval yards and in the water close to the shore in Saida bay.

Twelve of the remaining reactor compartments will within 2013 be prepared for onshore storage. Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation, allocates almost 700 million rubles (€17 million) for the work, reports GTRK Murman. The remains of the submarines must be taken into dry-dock where the attached compartments will be cut off. Then the radioactive reactor compartment will be sealed and made ready for long-term storage at the storage facility in Saida bay.

Construction of the German funded Saida bay facility started in 2004 and by September this year, 47 reactor compartments are placed on the huge concrete pad surrounded by barbed wire walls, Rosatom reports.

Even when the spent nuclear fuel is removed from the reactors, the metal inside the compartments are serious radioactive contaminated. Awaiting the half-life to bring down the radioactive isotopes, the compartments must be kept safe from leakages to the environment. That could take another 100 years.

The €350 million storage in Saida will, when filled up, be the largest radioactive waste storage facility in Barents Russia.

Read also: Norwegian officials visited reactor storage

In addition to the reactor compartments from the Cold War submarines, the storage will bring ashore reactors from the nuclear powered icebreakers to be decommissioned in the years to come. Also, compartments from several of the navy’s service vessels that were handling spent nuclear fuel will, when decommissioned, be stored at the facility. So will the infamous, heavily contaminated Lepse service ship.

The storage pad covers a huge area. That is needed when each of the reactor compartments is weighting some 1.600 tons. In conjunction with the concrete pad a large area for storage of up to 100.000 cubic meters of solid radioactive waste is now under construction. So is a treatment plant for solid and liquid radioactive waste.

The goal is to bring in all radioactive waste that today are stored under unsafe conditions at the many naval bases and yards around the coast of the Kola Peninsula. All the waste will then be stored in Saida bay until Russia one day in the future establishes a final deep-geological repository.

Saida bay is located in closed off military area between Murmansk and Russia’s border to Norway.

Although heavy security restrictions in and around the large-scale radioactive waste and reactor storage, the guards have their own sense of humor. When BarentsObserver visited the site, we had to pass through the sluice gate checking like any other nuclear site in the world. The only difference is that when entering other places, the detector will either give you a green light or a boring beep signal. At the facility in Saida you know are “clean” when the detector triggers the melody “Smoke on the water.”