Russia's Northern Fleet at heart of nuclear crisis

While Russia grapples with the fate of the stricken submarine Kursk, RUPERT CORNWELL finds another catalogue of disaster in the nearby icy wastes where its Northern Fleet is serviced.

MURMANSK - "Hero city," boasts the massive grey concrete slab on the drive into the bleak expanses of Murmansk.

But today, "Radiation Scare City" might be a better name for the great port above the Arctic Circle, destination for the Allied convoy lifeline in the Second World War.

Murmansk is still an important port. But its main post-Soviet distinction is as the gateway to the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia, and to the bases of Russia's Northern Fleet, generator of perhaps the greatest - and certainly the least protected - concentration of nuclear waste on earth.

Solid radioactive waste is stored at 11 sites around the peninsula, often in the open without any protection. Liquid waste is stored at the five main naval bases on the Kola, usually in equally poor conditions.

The stricken Kursk was based at Zapadnaya Litsa, or "Western Estuary," just 48km east of Russia's border with Norway. On the estuary's western shore lies Andreyeva Bay, where 21000 spent fuel rods - equal to 90 reactor cores - are stored in rusting containers and tanks whose contents are exposed to the skies.

On the eastern side is Nerpicha, home to, among other vessels, six 30,000-tonne Typhoons crammed with nuclear warheads, the largest submarines ever built.

For curious Westerners, Murmansk is as far as you get. Severomorsk, the headquarters of the Northern Fleet which lies 16km to the north, is closed to foreigners, while Zapadnaya Litsa is off limits even to Russians, apart from workers at the bases and the submariners themselves.

In an illustration of the obsessive secrecy which pervades these parts, British Nuclear Fuels two years ago joined French and Norwegian companies in a $US50 million ($111 million) scheme for an interim storage facility for spent submarine fuel. Fine - except that the Russians have not allowed a single foreign specialist to the site. But, as always, secrecy breeds rumour.

Wedged claustrophobically along the eastern side of its fiord, Murmansk is a city where you feel you are living on the nuclear edge. Still moored close to its centre is the infamous cargo ship Lepse, laden with hundreds of damaged fuel elements from nuclear-powered ice-breakers based in the port.

Clean-up work on the Lepse has now started. But what dire stories are swirling there in the wake of the Kursk disaster may only be guessed at - though what happened for a few hours one May day in 1998 may convey the flavour.

Rumours flashed around Severomorsk that a Delta class submarine carrying nuclear missiles had had a major accident in the Barents Sea. When the stories reached Murmansk and its population of 500,000, children were sent home from school and police issued with iodine tablets.

Calm returned only when the regional governor and senior Northern Fleet officers held a press conference to insist that the episode had been merely a planned exercise to test reaction to a possible nuclear accident on board a submarine.

Thomas Nilsen, a specialist at Norway's Bellona Foundation, the world authority on the nuclear pollution threat posed by the Northern Fleet, was sceptical about that explanation then. And the Kursk disaster has come as no surprise to him now.

"Ever since the financial collapse of autumn 1998, the situation has been desperate for the Northern Fleet. There hasn't been enough money for wages and maintenance, the best officers have left for jobs where at least their salaries are paid."

But one of the first things Vladimir Putin did after becoming President was to go to Murmansk and spend a night on a nuclear missile submarine.

"That was a sign of how important he believes the fleet to be," Nilsen said this week.

Even at the best of times conditions were dicey. When Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, a founder of America's nuclear Navy, once paid a goodwill visit to the giant nuclear icebreaker Lenin in Murmansk, he tested himself afterwards for radiation exposure - to discover that in half an hour he had absorbed as much radioactivity as in half a lifetime on US nuclear-powered craft.

But his problems were nothing as to the dilemma of Putin today, of trying to keep up with the United States as a global nuclear power without the resources to do so. The nuclear crisis of the Northern Fleet is a measure of Russia's failure to square that circle.

- INDEPENDENT

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