Cleaning up the Soviet legacy

At first glance, Russia’s Kola bay — with its crystal-clear waters and soaring mountainous backdrop — is a location straight out of Vladimir Putin’s holiday snaps. But scratch beneath the surface, turn your gaze to the rusting hulks that line its shores, and the beauty quickly turns to horror. For this is the home of Atomflot, a nuclear icebreaker base now considered to be one of the environmental hotspots of the former Soviet Union.

At the heart of this nuclear dustbin sits the Lepse; a retired support vessel, streaked with rust, barely afloat, and crammed to the gunnels with around 650 largely damaged fuel rods from spent nuclear fuel assemblies. Thought to present the biggest radiation risk of all retired nuclear service ships in Russia, it has been described by experts as a floating Chernobyl.

Taken in isolation the Lepse is terrifying enough. But the vessel is a potent symbol of a wider, even more worrying problem: Russia’s Soviet-era heritage; a hastily developed, poorly designed, and now crumbling assemblage of reactors, ships and weapons that is regarded with increasing discomfort by Russia, its neighbours and the rest of the world. Fortunately the international community is awake to the threat. And despite its often fractious political relations with the west, Russia is the focus of almost unprecedented international collaboration, as a host of countries contribute money, expertise and equipment to the planet’s most challenging and dangerous clean-up operation.

One man who knows more than most about the scale of this challenge is Balthasar Lindauer, deputy director of nuclear safety at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) — the international group that manages the funds for many of Russia’s clean-up programmes.

Talking to The Engineer from his London headquarters, Lindauer contemplates the Lepse with horror. ‘I’ve spoken to people who worked on the ship when it was operating, and they tell me that sometimes the fuel wouldn’t fit into channels so they would use hammers to force the fuel into the superstructure.’

In the early stages of investigating the Chernobyl site robots were used and sometimes they didn’t make it — their electronic components were unable to cope with the radiation they found

Precisely how the vessel will be dealt with is still open to debate. The high radiation levels and the fact that many of the fuel rods are damaged means that humans can only spend very limited amounts of time on or near the boat. But time is running out. ‘It has been in danger of sinking for quite a number of years so it’s a very urgent project — it cannot wait for ever,’ said Lindauer. The eventual solution, he believes, is likely to involve robots. But even these systems must be carefully designed to cope with the polluted environment. He added: ‘In the early stages of investigating the Chernobyl site robots were used and sometimes they didn’t make it — their electronic components were unable to cope with the radiation they found.’

The Lepse is not an isolated case. Some 50km to the west, in a similarly deceptive setting, is Andreeva Bay, former home of the Soviet Union’s Northern Fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and icebreakers; now one of the world’s largest nuclear dumping grounds.

COPY MISSING  - LOST IN MIGRATION TO NEW WEB PLATFORM

The contract for the design and construction of this shield — known as the new safe confinement — has been awarded to Novarka, a consortium headed up by French civil engineering firm Vinci, which is finalising the design. Lindauer expects the complete structure — a 20,000 tonne, 105m-high arch — to be installed over the reactor as soon as 2012.

The Soviets had the mentality that they would deal with problems when they arose and not before — lots of things were not forseen in a detailed fashion

Balthasar Lindauer

To protect workers from the radiation levels around the sarcophagus that can burn them within 15 minutes the plan is to assemble the shield to the west of the main site in an area sheltered from the worst of the radiation and then slide it into position along specially constructed rails. The cost of constructing the shelter has been estimated at around $1.6bn (£965m), although with so much still unknown about the site, Lindauer said that it is impossible to put an exact price on it. ‘There are all kinds of unexpected situations — for example, when you build a foundation around a shelter you can hit radioactive waste that has been buried there and that would hold up your construction.’

Indeed, encountering the unexpected is, he said, something that has characterised not just the Chernobyl clean-up but also the work on decommissioning other Soviet-era reactors in Lithuania, Slovakia and Bulgaria. ‘The Soviets had the mentality that they would deal with problems when they arose and not before — lots of things were not forseen in a detailed fashion.’ Nevertheless, Lindauer seems reasonably confident that the mistakes of Chernobyl will not be repeated. ‘There are a lot of reactors in the former Soviet Union that, from a western point of view, probably lack the appropriate safety levels. But lessons from Chernobyl have been taken into account and the risk of a similar accident happening is relatively low. We definitely hope that this will remain a one-off.’