TL: Preliminary Report on: Greenpeace Visit to Closed City of Severodvinsk SO: Greenpeace International (GP) DT: October 2, 1991 Keywords: nuclear weapons nfs expeditions russia ussr ports navy greenpeace gp reports fareast ships submarines accidents problems / by Joshua Handler Research Coordinator Nuclear Free Seas Campaign and John Sprange Coordinator Nuclear Free Seas Campaign USSR Greenpeace International (GP) 9 October 1991 Introduction On October the 1st and 2nd, Greenpeace campaigners visited the city of Severodvinsk -- the first time that an outside environmental group was allowed into this naval city which houses the Soviet Union's major nuclear submarine building and repair plants. Severodvinsk is a closed city of 250,000 people, located in the north of the Soviet Union near Arkhangelsk. Since 1938, it has been a center of naval construction. The city contains the world's largest nuclear powered submarine shipyard and a major submarine overhaul, repair and nuclear reactor refuelling facility. The Soviet Union's first nuclear-powered submarines were built in Severodvinsk in the late 1950s, and the world's largest submarines, the 18,500 ton Typhoon class ballistic missile submarines, were constructed there. The visit to Severodvinsk was part of an investigation into the environmental impact of the Soviet nuclear navy carried out by Greenpeace campaigners over the past year, in the north (Murmansk and Severodvinsk) and in the Far East (Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk) of the Soviet Union. On September the 23 and 24, Greenpeace hosted a conference in Moscow which brought people from naval nuclear ports around the Soviet Union together with western representatives. The seminar disclosed new information about the dumping of Soviet naval nuclear radioactive waste at sea. In Severodvinsk, Greenpeace campaigners met City Council members, the Chief of Staff of the White Sea naval base, Vice- Admiral N. P. Pakhomov, the vice-director of the Severodvinsk industrial complex and head of the repair and refuelling facility, N. Y. Kalistratov, and radiological safety and environmental specialists from the Navy, industrial plants and city. The trip was arranged with the help of city council members and Alexander F. Emelyanenkov, Peoples's Deputy for the Arkhangelsk region, and with the permission of the USSR Ministry of Defense. The meetings covered radiation safety, radioactive waste handling procedures, accident plans, decommissioning programs, health effects, and defense conversion plans. A number of problems emerged: - monitoring carried out by the City Environmental Committee shows that radioactive material has migrated outside the nuclear submarine plant. But monitoring within the plant itself is not allowed by the military; - Civilian authorities are not notified of accidents at the plant or aboard submarines, and contingency plans for an accident on a nuclear submarine are kept secret from them. - Health data from the city region is unreliable. Better data is needed to understand the health impact of the plant on the local population. - Submarine production is falling at the plant, but there are no coherent plans for defense conversion, or for an environmental clean-up of the area. Greenpeace is concerned that: - The Soviet Navy's secrecy will prevent a full environmental and health impact assessment from being completed. - There is an enormous nuclear waste disposal problem on the Kola peninsula. The military needs to make clear as soon as possible how much waste is located there, and what are the plans for it. Otherwise the world community will remain suspect that the waste is being dumped at sea, as has happened in the past. - The lack of planning will make the difficult process of converting the plant to civilian production harder; and in fact military production may be unnecessarily drawn out if a plan for conversion is not forthcoming. In particular Greenpeace found that: Radioactive safety and contamination: According to a map prepared by the City Environmental Committee, large parts of Severodvinsk have radiation levels which are twice the background level of 7 micro- roentgens an hour. Of special concern was an area on the north side of the refuelling facility where inadequately or unfiltered water used for washing submarine and repair equipment spreads outside the plant. Radioactive particles in this water have raised radiation levels to above 35 micro- roentgens an hour outside the plant. It is assumed that the levels are higher actually inside the facility's grounds; however, this information is still secret as local authorities are not allowed to enter the plant to examine the source of this radioactive pollution. Refuelling facility authorities admitted the designers of the facility had not taken into account adequate filtering or disposal of this water when the facility was constructed. The plant is conducting research to assess the situation, but according to Kalistratov, it is "not so dangerous as to shut down the entity." No plans for a clean-up seemingly exist. Vice-Admiral N. P. Pakhomov, admitted that workers had suffered from spills of radioactive liquids. He refused to elaborated on the frequency or extent of these spills. He did indicate, however, the refuelling facility had luckily avoided any serious accidents, like the reactor explosion that befell a Pacific Fleet submarine during refuelling in 1985 near Vladivostok. Plans for responding to a nuclear reactor accident aboard a submarine: These plans exist but are kept secret from local authorities, according to Severodvinsk city officials. Local authorities wish to know about these plans and coordinate with the Navy to develop a joint response. No coordination, however, has been forthcoming. If an accident were to occur, an already chaotic situation would be made more disastrous by the lack of such planning. Radioactive waste and submarine decommissioning: Nuclear submarines are almost constantly in the refit facility undergoing refuelling, generating a constant stream of spent reactor fuel and other radioactive wastes. According to Admiral Pakhomov, spent reactor fuel is loaded on specialized submarine service ships and directly taken to the Murmansk area. Other radioactive wastes are held temporarily at the facility but then are also shipped to the Murmansk area. Submarines are also being decommissioned, according to the Admiral, at a rate of about one a year. At the refit facility, the fuel is taken off and other equipment is removed. The reactor compartment the submarine is sealed up and then the whole submarine is towed to a facility in the Murmansk area, and held in a storage afloat condition pending plans of how to dispose of the reactor compartments, and the hull itself. Local residents complain that there is a backlog of submarines in the area awaiting the decommissioning process. They wish these submarines would be removed as soon as possible. These details, combined with information Greenpeace gathered in Murmansk about radioactive waste disposal from naval ships and nuclear-powered icebreakers, indicates there are sizable radioactive waste depositories on the Kola peninsula in the Murmansk region. Admiral Pahkomov and plant officials denied any waste was dumped in the White Sea, but given what is being discovered about past ocean dumping of radioactive waste by the USSR, Greenpeace is concerned that some of the waste in the Murmansk regions is or will be dumped at sea. Submarine accidents: While Greenpeace was in Severodvinsk, the news about a submarine accident in the White Sea broke. A modern Typhoon ballistic missile submarine, reportedly carrying 18 nuclear armed submarine-launched ballistic missiles, as well as two testing missiles, suffered an accident when one of the training missiles misfired. Plant workers reportedly complained they had little advance notice before the submarine was brought into Severodvinsk. As a result they had to hurriedly shift some of the nuclear refuelling barges to make room for the damaged submarine. Accidents like this are reported to happen at least once a year. Greenpeace also received confirmation from Admiral Pakhomov that a early model liquid-metal cooled reactor submarine suffered a severe accident in 1968 when its coolant "froze." There are conflicting reports, however, what was done with the reactor. The Admiral claimed it was removed from the submarine, and has been in a land based storage site near Murmansk for the past twenty years. Analysts in Moscow, however, said that the damaged reactor was only kept on land for several years after the accident, after which it was encased in concrete and dumped on or just off Nova Zemlya. Health effects: As an measure of the safety of the plant operations, local health officials claimed that local infant mortality rates had declined from 30.3 per thousand in 1961 to 8.8 per 1000 in 1985 (8.8 per thousand is lower than that of Russia's as a whole and the whole Arkhangelsk region as well). However, they also noted there is an increase in the proportion of tumors in the 8.8 number. There was a general agreement, however, that the data needed to make an accurate assessment of the effects of the plant on the health of the residents was not available. Defense Conversion: Indications are that submarine production will be falling at Severodvinsk. Navy officials in Murmansk told Greenpeace during a visit to that city in early September, that production has almost halted in Severodvinsk. Admiral Pakhomov noted that economic troubles, and the break up of the Soviet Union had already interrupted supplies to the plant. Local residents said two of the building ways were full of a equipment, but that nothing was being built on them, while others related that unemployment was on the rise at Severodvinsk as work was cut back at the plant. City officials thought that production would drop, perhaps as much as by a half next year. Due to declining military production, Severodvinsk city officials are interested in defense conversion plans. The large scale effort of coordination between the plant, the city and higher level authorities that will be needed to achieve conversion of this specialized facility has not yet occurred. Nor are city officials sure where the capital for such conversion will be found. They expressed interest in receiving technical help from the west on how to achieve defense conversion.