CHAPTER FOUR
FLOATING REACTORS
Nuclear Hubris after the Fall of Communism
Through swamps and bog, over rivers and creeks, along disheveled farmlands and denuded forest, past sleepy, decrepit towns, the two-lane road from Arkhangelsk runs along the White Sea shoreline west toward the port city of Severodvinsk, where it ends amid massive shipbuilding factories that have employed the city’s residents since its founding at the height of Stalin’s great terror. In 1936, in anticipation of war with Hitler, Stalin ordered the Gulag administration to establish a shipyard on the White Sea, removed from foreign attack and isolated from domestic awareness and foreign espionage. Tens of thousands of gulag prisoners, their guards, and engineers arrived by railway in Isagorka, on the left bank of the Northern Dvina River, and then built a railroad to the site of the future shipyard. Arkhangelsk, with the only shipyards outside of Leningrad, lay on the right bank, but would not have a railroad station until the early 1970s.
The gulag prisoners of Iagrinlag (Iagry Island Camp) lived in tents or drafty barracks, exposed to vermin and rats, bitter cold in the winter, mud, and ravenous mosquitoes in the summer; the prisoners set immediately to building warships. At the dawn of the atomic age, Severodvinsk workers were instructed to produce nuclear submarines, eventually turning out nearly 200 of them, powered by a total of 400 reactors, including the Kursk, the largest attack submarine in the world that tragically sank in 2002, killing all men aboard, taking its reactors to the bottom of the White Sea, and reminding all Russian citizens, including President Vladimir Putin, of the challenges of remaining, or becoming again, a superpower with modern space and nuclear programs.
In spite of the military significance of Severodvinsk, the road from Arkhangelsk was paved only in 1968 and until quite recently lay in disrepair, overwhelmed by potholes, lacking guardrails, and poorly plowed in the winter, a technology totally incongruous with the economic, military, and geopolitical significance of Severodvinsk for the nation’s leaders. Of course, the major reason for the poverty of the road was to ensure that Severodvinsk—one of roughly forty closed military cities established during the cold war with a total of perhaps 2 million residents whose lives were anonymous even to close relatives—remained closed to outsiders and to discourage insiders from leaving. In 2006, after years of lobbying, the town fathers, engineers, and businessmen succeeded in pressuring the federal and Arkhangelsk provincial governments to allocate funds to modernize the highway in support of growing market opportunities for the shipyards that have begun the long process of converting military production to such civilian enterprises as home and office furniture, oil drilling platforms, and yachts. And floating nuclear power stations.
Floating nuclear power stations (or PAES in their Russian acronym) will consist of two compact pressurized water reactors at 60 to 80 MW of power, enough to support a town of 200,000 people with all of its electricity needs. The PAES could also produce a combination of electricity and steam for industry, home heating, or even water desalination; the Moroccan government wants to buy floating reactors to turn ocean into drinking water. Namibian officials may also acquire a floating reactor. Sergei Kirienko, head of Russia’s atomic energy agency, Rosatom, remarked on a visit to Namibia, “Today Russia is present on all continents in the sphere of atomic energy but we had left out Africa. Here there is a big potential market and we must be successful in this market.” As for floating reactors for Namibia, “We are ready to build one,” Mr Kirienko said.1 Namibia has apparently agreed to work with Russia to develop its uranium reserves.
The reactors with their biological shielding will float on a large barge, along with a building holding the control room, computer facilities, housing for workers, and a small cafeteria and kitchen. According to plans, the first floating reactor will float out of Severodvinsk shipyards for local operation by 2010. The authorities of Rosatom will be happy to order another dozen PAES to be constructed for sale, to be towed and moored in any estuary, tidal basin, bay, or river at home or abroad for international customers. The PAES designers claim that they are “100% safe,” capable of taking a direct hit from an airplane and still maintaining reactor integrity, hence the interest of the governments of China, Morocco, Indonesia, and others in purchasing them for the modest fee of $120 million. Yet PAES utilize uranium enriched 4 times higher than the amount normally used in reactors and hence could be converted to bomb use much more easily, and they will have only the barge and shielding as protection from a torpedo or bomb from underwater, let alone from waves, while land-based reactors have multimeter-thick concrete walls—and are stationary.2 Still, Minister Kirienko touted the advantages of floating reactors at a press conference: “Floating NPPs [nuclear power plants] work on 12%–14% enriched uranium. Everything lower than 20% is low enriched uranium and is not subject to non-proliferation restrictions. That’s why we can freely use such plants everywhere in the world. But before exporting a product one should test it at home. That’s why we are building the first such plant in Severodvinsk. We need a finished product so potential buyers could come and see it. We are also planning to produce a plant with a capacity of less than 10 MW. You don’t need to refuel it: you fuel it once and it works for 25–30 years.”3 Even throwaway reactors?
From generation to generation, from old engineers and reactor operators to younger ones, unbridled nuclear enthusiasm persists in Rosatom’s extensive programs to rejuvenate the peaceful nuclear atom. This enthusiasm extends from floating reactors to factories capable of mass-producing reactors, all part of an official goal of building 100 reactors over the next twenty years, a pace never before even distantly achieved anywhere in the world. The programs raise significant questions about whether Russia or any nation should embark on nuclear renewal before issues of reactor safety and location and the disposition of nuclear waste are resolved. But Rosatom will go ahead absent public discussion, issuing glossy publications and superficial public pronouncements about the glories of the peaceful atom. The publications reflect a shocking continuity in the hubris of Soviet and Russian nuclear engineers who only a generation before presented the world with Chernobyl, and they indicate that the current-day Russian leaders share their predecessors’ aspirations for great power status and empire that are symbolically displayed by reactors, rockets, and other big technologies.4
Floating reactors reveal continuity with the very recent Soviet technological past in a variety of ways that go far beyond reliance on designs that evolved from closed nuclear facilities of the cold war 1950s and 1960s. Nuclear reactor technology including the fuel cycle continues to tie Russia with the former Soviet republics and with the former socialist nations of East Central Europe. They rely on Rosatom for expertise, components, and nuclear fuel. Russian leaders see nuclear technology as a tool of foreign policy, as their Soviet forebears did, and hope to use it to transform economic connections into political relations. In addition, the Russian government through Rosatom remains the main engine of development of this sector of the economy, as it does for space, nanotechnology, and other cutting-edge areas of scientific prestige and economic-military potential.5 Following the Soviet tradition, in pushing nuclear technology, the federal government has emasculated local and regional opposition, raided and closed a number of environmental NGOs for specious reasons, and weakened regulatory agencies concerned with nuclear safety issues from siting and design to licensing. The intractable problem of nuclear waste, the displacement of people, the hubris of engineers—these aspects of the “peaceful atom” remain constant across borders and through time.
Floating reactors reveal the contradictory essence of Russian technological style: the ability of the nation’s engineers to design rocket ships and submarines, yet difficulties in building safe roads; the construction of an industrial superpower in one generation under Stalin, yet challenges in meeting consumer demands and maintaining infrastructure into the twenty-first century; and the continued crucial role of the state, and the political oligarchy at the top of that state, to command immense resources of engineering expertise, capital, labor, and time, while interfering with innovation in the private sector. The Russian government remains uncomfortable with civic culture and strives to silence public dissent for its big science and military programs. As for President Putin, and now apparently for President Medvedev, following in the footsteps of Peter the Great and Stalin, the crucial ingredient in the development of floating reactors may be the simple desire to maintain Russia’s coveted position as a world power. And as for Lenin and other Russian leaders, electricity, in this case powered by reactors, remains a panacea for economic development and international political aspirations.6 Are floating reactors a part of a nuclear GOELRO?7
Technology and the Assimilation of the Russian North
In 1694, the twenty-two-year-old Peter the Great, who assembled Russia’s first great navy to conduct a successful war with Sweden, ordered a dockyard built at Arkhangelsk and personally constructed a large ship there.8 The White Sea was a logical choice for a shipyard. Although frozen up to five months out of the year, the sea is protected by the Kola Peninsula from northern attack and is only 600 miles north of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Few people have settled in the Arkhangelsk region because of its dense forests and unforgiving climate, with winter temperatures reaching –40°C, and in the summer with thick clouds of mosquitoes and swarming flies that generate fondness for the winter. Peasants gathered bees and honey, trapped animals, and fished. Since agriculture was poorly developed, serfdom never fully took hold, while modest and labor-intensive forestry, fishery, and mining enterprises grew up and collapsed with great frequency.
Russian leaders long sought to establish political and military control over the Far North, its people and resources, and since the cold war have seen nuclear power as a key to that control. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks redoubled efforts to subjugate the Arctic. They were especially concerned with securing the region since British and American soldiers were bivouacked in Arkhangelsk at the end of World War I in a failed effort to keep Russia in the war after the fall of the Provincial Government. They were also wary of Arkhangelsk’s citizens since a government independent from Moscow was temporarily established in the region. When Stalin came to power, he accelerated the pace of conquest using trails, roads, and railroads to penetrate the region and relied heavily on gulag prisoners to carry out the work. Like Peter, Stalin grasped the importance of a navy, and he ordered prisoners to build shipyards and vessels. They first called the gulag shipbuilding town “Molotovsk” in honor of Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, signatory of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 that permitted Hitler and Stalin to avoid war for two years while dividing Eastern Europe among themselves. Several hundred thousand prisoners, some requisitioned from the nearby Solovetskii labor camp located in a former monastery on an island in the White Sea, the Bolsheviks’ first major prison labor camp, were assembled to transform the swamps, bogs, and estuaries into a naval yard.
The Soviet dream of opening the Far North using modern technology—and slave labor—expanded rapidly in the 1930s. Stalin harnessed the Gulag to serve state economic programs through a wealthy and powerful organization called Glavsevmorput (the Administration of the Northern Sea Route), whose network of labor camps extended from Arkhangelsk to Nakhodka on the Pacific.9 The directors of Glavsevmorput learned their methods from the construction of the Belomor (White Sea–Baltic) Canal, a murderous slave labor project that was glorified in the press and in the publications of playwright Maxim Gorky in a paean to forced political reeducation of mistrusted bourgeois elements into reliable workers.10 Yet the project failed on all counts, with tens of thousands of prisoners dying from exposure to the elements while armed only with pickaxes, shovels, and wheelbarrows, and with the canal being built too narrow and shallow to handle modern ships and leaking through porous walls and basin. Will floating reactors suffer from technological defects as well?
Many of the major early Soviet construction organizations were subordinated to the secret police apparatus and its ever-growing system of labor camps, the Gulag (State Administration of Prisons). Beginning with the construction of the Belomor Canal in the early 1930s, the system rapidly expanded north and east. It may be that the roots of the employment of prisoners in economic tasks can be found in the party’s determination to “militarize labor” under Trotsky during War Communism to raise production through coercion of laborers, since capital stock had been destroyed or fallen into disrepair, and certainly that which remained was outdated. War Communism also saw detachments of loyal communist workers and Red Army soldiers sent into the countryside to requisition grain at the point of a gun. Gulag prisoners worked primarily in road and railroad construction, mining and metallurgy, and forestry. As a rule they were poorly equipped, poorly dressed, and poorly fed. The projects were seen by party officials as a cheap way to subjugate nature while simultaneously reeducating both political prisoners and common criminals. In the northern district alone (today’s Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, and Karelian Provinces) the Gulag involved hundreds of thousands of prisoners interned in a variety of camps. The archival materials reveal the entire lack of concern for prisoners, whether kulaks, political prisoners, Estonians and other Balts, or Poles and Germans after the war. The camp authorities frequently reported injuries, illness, high absenteeism, and tardiness among their charges.11
In spite of the slave labor, or perhaps because of it, Severodvinsk long suffered from inattention to communal services. The prisoners frequently mishandled equipment. Four German presses purchased at 1.3 million rubles in 1936 and eleven derrick cranes rusted in the open air waiting for proper installation. This may be because of failed literacy campaigns that left many of the workers unable to follow let alone read instructions. The town lagged in electricity production through the 1960s and did not install an extensive telephone network until later. Molotovsk’s crucial significance for the Soviet defense industry did not translate into the provision of rudimentary technologies of housing, schooling, and everyday life. Teachers worked in drafty, damp, and overcrowded temporary wooden structures. City planners had not provided for hospitals or beds, for laundries or public baths. Muddy thoroughfares flooded every spring and fall and lacked street lights. The sewage and water supply systems had failed, with water treatment unable to stem the spread of infection through the pipes. Houses, too, had begun to collapse from the inside out, as had sidewalks into the swampy soil. Passenger trains in the region were woefully inadequate to the task, from the miserable waiting rooms, to the platforms built too low, to the filth and garbage that accumulated in the wagons. In the early 1950s, even with thousands of prisoners, housing construction could not close the gap with demand, nor could they produce enough bricks to abandon the wooden structures. The town fathers repeatedly requested additional slave laborers for the local labor camp, Iagrinlag, in 1954–55 even as the camps were beginning to empty.12
Indigenous People and Nuclear Power from the Arctic to the Pacific
Nuclear technologies have required great sacrifice on the part of local people wherever they are installed, and other local people often suffer direct health consequences of uranium mining and nuclear testing. In the process of establishing various military and later military nuclear facilities, the authorities expelled indigenous northern peoples from their homelands, particularly the Komi and Nenets in Arkhangelsk Province, including from the islands of Novaia Zemlia, where the Soviet armed forces conducted hundreds of nuclear tests. These people suffered the same fate as Bikini islanders in the South Pacific, who, at the hands of the United States Army and Navy, were moved from their atolls. The Bikini atoll was turned into a testing area to demonstrate the dangers of nuclear weapons; military planners moved ahead with the confused assumption that, on seeing the violent power of nuclear bombs, the USSR and other nations would do as the United States insisted to prevent proliferation, while allowing the United States to remain the only nation with nuclear weapons. This attitude, in other forms and under other presidential administrations, has seen more countries join the nuclear club every decade.
U.S. officials promised the Bikinians cleaner, better, and more modern houses on other islands and a return to their homes after a prompt and courteous cleanup. Many Bikinians, abruptly separated from their lifestyle, suffered from malnutrition, and decades and hundreds of millions of dollars later the Bikini atolls remain highly radioactive, unfit for habitation, not surprisingly after twenty-three nuclear bombs were detonated in the area.13 Along the Columbia River in Washington State, Indians face uncertain long-term health prospects given their ingestion of radioisotopes in salmon that is a major part of their diet.14 Apache and Navaho Indians who mined uranium have higher rates of lung and other cancers, and they face renewed pressure to seek ore in their lands for rejuvenated nuclear programs in the twenty-first century, while other Indians have considered opening nuclear waste facilities on their land to generate income for communities that face some of the highest unemployment rates and worst public health problems in the United States.15 Many of the data related to such nuclear safety issues as exposure of miners were classified during the cold war. When any government denies access to information in the name of national security, as the Russians and Americans continue to do in some cases, it suggests that the label is applied not for security reasons alone but to hide moral failings and liability.
Forced accommodation of the indigenous people of the former Soviet Union to modern technology was similarly unforgiving. The Chukchi, Nenets, and other minority nationalities in the empire have never evinced respect for the imposition of modern technology into their lives.16 In the Kurasawa film Dersu Uzala, based on a 1923 book by Vladimir Arsenev of the same name, Dersu, a Goldi hunter aware of the spirits of animals in the forest, saves a turn-of-the-century Tsarist officer and his surveying crew from ignorance, frigid cold, and hunger as they chart the immense resources of the Far East. When Dersu loses his eyesight, he accepts the captain’s invitation to live with him in the city. But he cannot tolerate urban smells, noises, and moods. Dersu dies, heartbroken over the transformation of Siberia into a Russian frontier. Stalin forced indigenous people in the Far North and Far East to modernize, driving them into collective reindeer farms beginning in the 1930s. Their homelands were expropriated during the cold war for nuclear testing and military bases. Soviet officials proudly claimed that the 14,000 Chukchi of the northeastern Arctic, who served as the butt of Soviet anecdotes for their alleged backwardness, benefited directly from the peaceful atom: in the 1970s, the Russian modernizers built the forerunner of PAES in Bilibino, Chukotia, a station consisting of four reactors, each at 12 MW, to power “boiler houses” that supported Moscow’s gold and tin mining enterprises in the region. While not strictly portable, the reactors were constructed of components and prefabricated forms and shipped by boat and rail for assembly over a foundation anchored into shale and permafrost. Locally generated electricity was a vast improvement over past efforts to bring electricity—and economic development—to the region since long-distance power line poles and towers sank, broke, or rotted into the swampy tundra. The authorities reported that the Chukchi were pleased with the reactors, referring to them happily as “a big fireplace.”
The Nenets suffered the fate of the Bikinians. They were removed from Novaia Zemlia, which became a site for scores of nuclear explosions, many of them atmospheric, and a dumping ground for haphazard disposal of waste, with carcasses of reactor cores and other highly radioactive waste littering the landscape. In one test in 1973, many people were likely killed when an underground explosion ejected 80 million cubic meters of earth into a nearby valley and formed a new lake. In the late 1990s Rosatom commenced new excavations to turn Novaia Zemlia into one of Russia’s main radioactive waste repositories, including the final resting place for 300 reactors from 190 submarines.17 But the authorities may have abandoned the plan, perhaps to resume nuclear testing some day on the site. Officials determined that it was “inexpedient” to build on Novaia Zemlia—because of global warming. They anticipated a swamp instead of permafrost and encountered higher costs than initially estimated. They have fixed instead on a site for a repository in the granite of the Kola Peninsula,18 near Komi and Saami lands.
Beyond Floating Reactors
Rosatom’s plans for nuclear renewal go far beyond floating reactors. Its engineers seek to build reactors throughout the nation, particularly in the European part. At one time, they had their hearts set on a spot on the ArkhangelskSeverodvinsk road for the construction of two 600 MW new-generation pressurized water reactors: the sleepy town of Rikasikha.19 During World War II a camp to train Nenets and Komi to serve in the Red Army in the war against Hitler, Rikasikha now reflects all of the contradictions of contemporary Russian society: it consists of muddy roads, small farms held together by old peasants, a few dachas for wealthier Severodvinskians, and a modern chicken and egg farm. Known otherwise only for the presence of a police control point on the road, Rikasikha grew out of the Molotovsk Railroad, itself part of the Gulag. Rosatom planned to commence construction of the reactors, estimated at $700 million each, in 2008, but scientists at the Institute of the Ecological Problems of the North detected the possibility of seismic activity at 8.0 on the Richter scale.
Where they will be built now is anyone’s guess, although they will be built in the region. Nuclear reactors have the blessings of Arkhangelsk and Severodvinsk officials because they will help wean Archangelsk Province from its reliance on two ancient fossil fuel cogeneration plants, or “TETs,” that produce steam heat and electricity. The construction will keep skilled workers from Severodvinsk doing what they do best: erecting steel girders; running conduit, piping, and wiring; and loading nuclear fuel. In winters past school children endured bitterly cold classrooms and listened to their teachers dressed in coats, hats, and gloves as fuel shortages at the inefficient TETs have left many neighborhoods without heat.
Possible locations for additional reactors are on the Kola Peninsula, across the White Sea from Arkhangelsk, at the Kola Nuclear Power Station at Poliarnye Zori, consisting of four 440 MW pressurized water reactors, or perhaps somewhere in Karelia. The Karelian and Murmansk plans worry local residents who still suffer from “radiophobia” because of the Chernobyl disaster, while Rosatom insists that the reactors will be safe and an important component of a modernized electrical energy generating system to power further regional economic development, including the operation of gas and oil pipelines across the Kola Peninsula to Murmansk and the shipping by tanker to European and perhaps North American clients.
To demonstrate how consonant plans for expansion of the nuclear enterprise are with fragile arctic (and other) ecosystems, the Kola Power Station personnel established a pond fishing operation in the warmed effluent waters of the station. The cooling water reenters the nearby lake from which it was initially drawn at 5°C higher temperature; this keeps proximate waters year round warm enough to raise trout and sturgeon from fingerlings. The trout are already being sold, while sturgeon production remains in experimental stages. Discussion of the practice of pond fisheries using nuclear effluent appeared in Atomnaia Energiia, the Soviet journal of atomic energy in the 1970s.
Given President Putin’s unwavering support for nuclear power, Rosatom recognizes no need for humility in its plans. Similar to Lenin’s plan to build communist society through a state electrification program, and Stalin’s even hungrier pursuit of electricity, President Putin has encouraged Rosatom to rejuvenate its civilian nuclear power programs rapidly. Toward that end, the Putin administration has cavalierly dismissed public concerns about nuclear power dating to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. One of Putin’s first acts as president was to eliminate the federal environmental protection agency, moving enforcement responsibilities to regional officials, but providing them with neither the budgets nor the manpower to uphold essentially inadequate laws. Simultaneously, the Russian nuclear regulatory body, Gosatomnadzor, lost many of its investigative and enforcement capabilities in the name of rejuvenation of the atom. The Federal Service of Public Safety, the direct descendent of the KGB, has intensified xenophobic scrutiny of NGOs, especially those allegedly with foreign ties, effectively halting public opposition to a variety of ecologically suspect projects, including nuclear power stations and dams.
In June 2006, on the eve of the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg where British, French, American, Japanese, and Russian adherents discussed the future of nuclear power, Putin sadly announced that the share of electrical energy produced in Russia by nuclear power was a miserly 16 percent (vs. 20 percent in the United States, and 80 percent in France and Hungary—and Vermont) and dropping. He urged Rosatom to increase the share to at least 25 percent by 2030.20 While scaled back several times since the mid-1990s when first announced, Rosatom’s bold new plans to build dozens of nuclear power stations west of the Urals in European Russia will require that four or five reactors come on line almost every year, with the time needed from the start of construction through testing, loading, and full power for any one reactor no more than a handful of years, much more quickly than ever before achieved in world experience.21 Deputy Minister of Rosatom, Bulat Nigmatulin, saw no impossibility here, announcing plans to double the output of nuclear power stations by 2015. Sergei Kirienko, the head of Rosatom, his predecessor deposed after a series of questionable business dealings that benefited him and his wife, followed by declaring that Russia will build forty stations at home in the next two decades and sixty abroad—100 reactors in twenty years on the basis of a standard model. A 2007 press release that refers to twenty-six new stations by 2020 casts some doubt over whether Rosatom will succeed in its 100-reactor target by 2030,22 but Kirienko remains confident. At a press conference he announced, “In 2012 we are supposed to start commissioning two units a year. Now we have twelve constructions in Russia and abroad. By 2020 we are to build twenty-six new nuclear power units against just thirty-one units built throughout the Soviet period. 2020 is not the end of the program. We are not going to stop but will be increasing the pace.”23
At a 2006 Kremlin press conference with President Putin, Rosatom head Sergei Kirienko touted the role of nuclear power in safely producing energy during a very cold snap that winter in the country’s heartland. He promised bigger things: Rosatom’s reactors would produce 25 percent of the country’s electrical energy by 2030. He referred then to the restoration of “the full technological cycle,” by which he meant resurrecting all aspects of the nuclear industry and reestablishing important technological processes lost in the different republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union—uranium mining enterprises in Kazakhstan, machine-building enterprises in Ukraine, and so on, that would “restore the technological chain that the Soviet nuclear industry had developed. The system operated as a unified chain and was probably the most effective in the world.” This would enable Rosatom to compete effectively on world markets to build at least forty and perhaps as many as sixty new reactors abroad, especially “in the Asia-Pacific region and in Europe.”24 Technology thus would be a foundation of reestablished ties with former Soviet republics and become again a major tool of foreign trade for Russia. Kirienko later pointed to another important continuity in the minds of officials, saying that “nuclear power stations have provided the country with more than 14 billion kilowatt hours. This is a record both for the Soviet Union and for Russia.”25
Nuclear engineers throughout the world argue that they have mastered civilian reactor technology over a half century of experience and will reduce construction costs and time by adopting techniques typical in any industry: the use of standard components, many of them mass-produced, and rapid assembly by a well-equipped, well-educated workforce trained to avoid errors in the field. In Russia they have, after all, built and still operate thirty-one civilian power-generating reactors at ten stations (the United States has 103 reactors at sixty-seven sites), and pressurized water reactors of Soviet design and construction continue to supply power reliably in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria (but not in Eastern Germany, where Soviet-era reactors were mothballed immediately after unification).
Russian leaders hope that nuclear technology will enable them to reestablish strong economic relations outside of the USSR—with former COMECON countries, for example, Bulgaria. Kremlin talks in 2008 between President Vladimir Putin and Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov considered such areas of bilateral cooperation as transport, investment, the military, and the energy sector. In addition to hopes for a new gas pipeline to bring Russian gas to Europe, the leaders talked about a newly signed general contract for construction of at least two VVER-1000 reactors at the Belen nuclear power plant in Bulgaria.26 Construction on up to six VVER-1000 reactors produced through Atommash for the Belen station on the Danube River, downstream from the Hungarian Paks nuclear power facility, began in 1981 but was abandoned 40 percent complete in 1990 after the collapse of the USSR. New reactors have gained importance to both countries in the twenty-first century.27 Bulgaria’s other Soviet-era station, Kozloduy, has six reactors on its site, but only two of them are in operation. Units one through four (VVER-440s) were shut down as part of the agreement of Bulgaria to enter the European Union since they could not be safely retrofitted to meet international standards, while units five and six (VVER-1000s) continue to operate. Unfortunately, many observers worry that the Belen reactors have been reborn too quickly, without adequate study of seismic conditions, without involvement in the public about safety issues, and with other problems that suggest how Soviet-era attitudes about technology assessment continue to accompany post-Soviet reactors and other technologies. The matter of cost, at perhaps $6 billion or more for each Rosatom reactor, also may delay further construction. (See chapter 2 for more discussion of the place of Soviet nuclear technology in East Central Europe.)
Russian engineers have long pursued cost-savings measures in nuclear power, first by establishing reactor “parks” where up to ten massive reactors shared basic equipment in standard factory buildings ever to expand capacity. Locating them in these parks, in the case of Chernobyl near a nature preserve, reflected their belief in the safe coincidence of big technology and nature. They planned to build another six reactors at Chernobyl beyond the four in operation when the disastrous explosion on April 26, 1986, required the evacuation of 135,000 people, the creation of a huge exclusion zone, and the construction of a frail and failing sarcophagus to entomb the reactor and halted the further development of the inherently unstable Chernobyl-type channel-graphite reactor, only in part because of the absence of a containment vessel. Soviet engineers favored this kind of reactor because of its relatively low capital costs per megawatt of capacity compared to reactors of other designs, its plutonium production capacity, the ability to refuel it during power generation, and the ease of expanding to bigger units, even to a monstrous size of 2,400 MW, 2 times larger than any reactor ever before built. (The European Union prodded Ukraine to close the last operating reactor at Chernobyl, no. 3, in 2000, with the promise of credits and assistance in building a new sarcophagus to entomb the old one; only in 2006 did the European governments and United States finally agree to provide that financing, perhaps as much as $750 million.)
Two half-completed cooling towers at Chernobyl stand as ghostly reminders of failed nuclear policies. Yet engineers and reactor operators, young and old, Soviet and post-Soviet, celebrate their faith in nuclear power and Chernobyltype reactors every July on a glade near a freshwater lake in western Lithuania, not far from the Ignalina Nuclear Power Station, the site of the two largest Chernobyl-type reactors ever built and the only ones outside of Russia and Ukraine, at the Dysnai Festival. To the consternation of the operators, Lithuania has agreed to shut down Ignalina as a precondition to join the European Union. The shutdown will have a significant impact on the country’s economy since the nation generates not just electricity but significant income from the sale of electricity east into the Russian grid. The operators find little solace in the promise to replace Ignalina with reactors acceptable to the EU from the point of view of safety and stability. In the interim, the residents of Visaginas, like Severodvinsk a town built to support nuclear reactors, a colony largely of Russians who moved here in the 1970s and 1980s from stations in Russia and Ukraine, as far away as Bilibino, will find unemployment and dislocation from careers supporting the peaceful atom.
But at the annual Dysnai Festival employees from the atomic empire of the former Soviet Union gather to sing, dance, perform skits, and eat shashlyk (a marinated shish kabob), all to celebrate the glories of nuclear power. Using their skills as electricians, plumbers, and carpenters comfortable with steam and electricity, they build a sauna in the woods, construct a stage on which to perform skits in homage of the peaceful atom, and tap into overhead power lines to illuminate the festival. The festival, established and run by former Communist Youth League members, demonstrates the widespread faith that engineers trained within the Soviet system continue to have that the peaceful atom of mass-produced floating and stationary reactors has a promising future.
The Soviet Legacy of Mobile and Mass-produced Nuclear Power Stations
The premature rush to standardization of scores of reactors has roots in the pressurized water reactor of Soviet design, the VVER, and the Atommash Factory in Volgodonsk on the Volga River. Barges play a role in this reactor, too. The strangely intriguing idea of a reactor factory on the Volga grew out of Stalin’s grandiose 1948 Plan for the Transformation of Nature, according to which the Volga and Don Rivers would be engineered through dams, reservoirs, and canals to heed five-year plans like clockwork while providing electricity, water, and an integrated transport system to the nation. Atommash arose near the Tsimlianskoe Reservoir on the Central Volga near the Volga-Don Canal. À la Henry Ford, engineers planned annually to build and ship eight massive, serially produced reactor vessels and associated equipment by barge for assembly at reactor parks in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Hungarian officials envisioned ordering ten of the 1,000 MW units from Atommash, which would then be floated through the Don-Volga Canal, down the Don, into the Black Sea, up the Danube through Bulgaria to Paks, Hungary, for installation. Atommash produced only three reactors before a wall in the main foundry collapsed owing to poor design and construction. In March of 2001, federal emergency management agency officials denied reports that there had been a radioactive discharge at the nearby Rostov nuclear power plant. Officials admitted that there had been a leak in the first loop of a steam generator that was immediately fixed and that radiation remained inside the reactor, while conditions at the station and in the area around the station remained normal.28 Shortly thereafter, President Putin showed the government’s faith in nuclear power when he joined Rosatom officials in April 2001 to christen the Volgodonsk reactor, the first reactor to come on line since the fall of the USSR, which had been manufactured locally at Atommash. Construction is well under way on a second reactor at Volgodonsk, and some engineers hope that Atommash will again begin spitting out scores of reactors in the near future.
This atomic enthusiasm is represented in the artifacts of the Soviet era still operating within major cities in the former Soviet Union. Fifty experimental reactors and critical assemblies that date to the early nuclear age—and their waste—fill scientific research institutes across Russia, many within the limits of major cities like Moscow and Kyiv. Rosatom also operates breeder reactors, a technology of proliferation that generates additional plutonium to load another reactor—or to be extracted for a bomb. The breeder reactor employs a liquid metal, usually sodium, as a coolant. The water used to produce steam and the liquid metal are an explosive mix: after a series of setbacks including sodium fires and leaks, the BN-600 breeder reactor came on line eleven years after plan. In spite of this delay, Rosatom now insists that the next breeder, the BN-800 (that is, 800 MW) will operate by 2012, and the BN-1800—the largest reactor ever built—will be producing plutonium and power by 2020 and then, in the words of Rosatom officials, “enter into serial production as a competitive commercial energy block.”29
Russian engineers have their greatest experience with “transportable” reactors. They deployed over 500 units in submarines, icebreakers, and freighters between 1955 and 2004, two-thirds of them in the Northern Fleet served by Severodvinsk and Murmansk. Based on these reactors, Rosatom, Rikhasikha, Arkhangelsk, Severodvinsk, and other officials logically think of floating reactors as a relatively simple technology with clear civilian applications that can be serially produced. In spite of scores of accidents, several of them major involving submarines, sodium fires at breeder reactors, failed pumps, and the Chernobyl disaster, engineers have maintained their hubris and have embarked on a plan to build at least a dozen PAES in the next decade.
The design of portable, floating, and other nuclear “engines” dates to the late 1940s and includes not only nuclear submarines but models for use on land and in the air. Engineers owe much of their inspiration for these engines to Igor Kurchatov, the head of the Soviet atom bomb project. Bombs in hand, Kurchatov turned to such peaceful applications as peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs), over 120 of them, to dig canals, create dams, fabricate underground storage caverns for industrial wastes, and put out oil well fires. Until the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 prohibited atmospheric tests and any venting of radioactive gases from an underground test, PNEs had great support among hubristic engineers. The tests continued until late in the Soviet period, the United States ceasing its PNE program after sixty-seven attempts in 1968 because of the impossibility of preventing venting and other repeated technical failures.30 Yet in 2007, specialists at the Kola Scientific Center expressed some hope for rejuvenation of PNEs, recalling wistfully a twin PNE only 10 kilometers from Kirovsk that in 1983 generated a shock wave to pulverize ore for mining. Nuclear geoengineering remains a fantasy of Soviet and post-Soviet—and no doubt American—specialists.
Yet Kurchatov’s love was reactors. He encouraged research on fusion with reactors based on principals of the physics of the sun. He supported the investigations of Igor Tamm, a future Nobel laureate in physics, and Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet atomic bomb, but better known for his selfless fight for human rights in the Brezhnev era, his Nobel peace prize, his exile and isolation in the city of Gorky, and his return to Moscow at Mikhail Gorbachev’s invitation where he became the conscience of perestroika. Less well known, Sakharov favored nuclear power to solve the world’s energy problems and proposed building reactors underground to be safe from terrorist attack and protect the environs from an explosion.31 Tamm and Sakharov proposed a donut-shaped or torroidal layout (“tokamak” reactor) of electromagnets to contain a superheated plasma of deuterium and tritium that would be fused into helium-4, releasing a tremendous amount of energy. The tokamak remains the most promising alternative among fusion reactors and the focus of the ongoing multimillion dollar joint ITER effort of Russia, Japan, the European Union, and the United States. Kurchatov secured the release of classified results from the tokamak program in anticipation of the first Geneva conference on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy in 1955. The breadth of Soviet programs simultaneously intrigued and bothered American delegates to Geneva, who thought that they themselves were no doubt well ahead of the Soviets in all areas. After the initial shock, they welcomed the knowledge that their Soviet colleagues shared their views of the promise of peaceful nuclear programs.
The Soviet press savored achievements in nuclear power, food irradiation, agriculture, and industry that generated suggestions from ordinary citizens. Among scores of letters, Kurchatov received one from a provincial peasant who suggested portable nuclear generators for use on the farm. Kurchatov asked his staff to write polite responses to the people whose ideas he found far-fetched, as if his ideas proposed nothing out of the ordinary.32 He provided the foundation for the Severodvinsk floating reactors a half century earlier in his plans for portable reactors, some of which might move about on tank treads, others by flatbed railway car, still others dropped from airplane by parachute in component parts into remote locations for assembly on site. One rationale for portable reactors derives from nuclear fuel, whose volume is significantly smaller than the amount of fossil fuel needed to produce a like amount of energy, which does not need oxygen for combustion, and which operates in Arctic temperatures while diesel engines are difficult to operate let alone start in winter. The transport of oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel into remote taiga or tundra was also costly.
Kurchatov imagined workers deployed by parachute into the Arctic along with reactor units and other equipment, assembling them quickly and producing electrical energy and heat to power new settlements such as that at Bilibino for the Chukchi. In his view, atomic energy would power communism itself, a society founded on copious quantities of electrical energy and easy access to resources. Unlike Stalin’s gulag system with Arctic prisoners poorly equipped and dressed, the workers of the Khrushchev era and beyond would toil effortlessly with the assistance of the atom. Soviet engineers built a series of experimental portable reactors toward these ends, including a crawling atomic power plant, the TES-3, at the closed city of Obninsk, in Kaluga Province about 100 miles southwest of Moscow, the birthplace of the peaceful atom in 1954 with a modest 5,000 kW reactor first contributing electricity for a civilian grid. This reactor produced steam heat for Obninsk until a few years ago, with the occasional water leak in the reactor hall quickly sopped up by babushki armed with mops and pails. Physicists hoped to have the TES-3 operational in time to ship to Brussels for the 1958 World’s Fair, but they decided against it. An Obninsk physicist told me with a light smile, “We were worried about irradiating the Queen of Belgium.” Still, the atom figured mightily in Soviet exhibitions at the Fair.
The organizers of the U.S. exhibit at Brussels on the theme “Unfinished Business” planned to include several panels on desegregation. This infuriated southern congressmen, who cut funding for the budget, and the Soviets gladly took over the freed-up area in the International Science Exposition to expand their displays of achievements both in space—Sputnik had shocked the world in 1957—and with the peaceful atom. Combining cosmic and atomic hubris, the Soviets ultimately launched over thirty nuclear-powered satellites, most of which are still in orbit, but two of which fell to earth, one breaking up over Canada, the other over Australia, spreading radioactive debris over hundreds of square miles. The advantage of the nuclear satellites was energy levels dozens of times higher than possible with solar panels. The disadvantage was the possibility of the spread of radioactivity throughout the environment if the rocket blew up on launch or if the satellite fell to earth.
Beyond space reactors and submarines, the prototype for floating reactors was the Lenin, a nuclear icebreaker launched in 1958. Dry-docked in Murmansk, it will soon be moved closer to the town center to serve as a museum and information center to remind citizens of their great nuclear heritage. The Lenin’s elegant interior of polished wood handrails, door frames, cabinets, and library and its sauna, pool, dining room, cafeteria, and elegant quarters for sailors—as in submarines, the quarters had to calm sailors who might be onboard for months without respite—suggested the domestication of the peaceful atom. Yet the aesthetics and craftsmanship did not extend to the reactor itself. On two occasions, after refueling, the authorities ordered the jettisoning of the reactor vessel into the Arctic Ocean for disposal, an act that gave rise to an apocryphal story that a reactor had melted down, burned through the hull of the vessel, and deposited itself on the ocean floor. Engineers subsequently deployed floating reactors in a half-dozen freighters and icebreakers to serve the northern sea route from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk and Norilsk to Dudinka and Vladivostok. To meet local energy shortfalls and keep soldiers and workers busy, in 1997 engineers proposed using the idle nuclear cruiser Ural with two 170 MW reactors to supply the Kamchatka Peninsula, which faced an unusually cruel winter and economic depression.
Kurchatov Institute engineers still share the atomic father’s certainty that nuclear power is the power of the north. One engineer commented as follows:
All of our vast [natural] resources get very expensive as soon as we start developing them with the use of gas and masut [black oil] technologies. I have traveled the North and I have seen lots of desolated villages and empty casks, while, for example, in Bilibino, I have seen greenhouses with tomatoes and cucumbers. I believe that in the nuclear power sector we must build whatever will give us some energy, otherwise, we will face a terrible fuel crisis. We may use not only KLT-40 but even smaller plants, for example, on Kamchatka … Nuclear energy is so effective that it allows us to forget about waste for 15–30 years and we get relaxed. I am very happy that we are building something. Of course, we could have cheaper projects but this is the only thing we can build for the time being. Floating [reactors have] excellent export prospects but I hope that the for-export plants will be less expensive.33
Nuclear engineers in the United States entertained similarly fantastic visions for nuclear engines. Lyell Borst, who moved from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to the University of Utah to Brookhaven National Laboratory, and his research team received tens of millions of dollars from the Atomic Energy Commission to design a nuclear locomotive that could run for a year without refueling. Military researchers and their private contractors spent billions of dollars to develop nuclear rocket ships and airplanes, the latter to stay aloft and safe from Soviet attack for months at a time.34 The challenges of excessive weight, strength of the landing gear and wings, shielding of pilots against radiation, and fear that a reactor might crash into someone’s backyard eventually derailed the program, but not before Air Force brass suggested using less shielding, to lighten the jet, and compensated by raising the level of exposure to radiation considered safe for airmen and shortening tours of airborne duty. Physicists at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station conceived of several experiments to test the viability of atomic jets: they loaded reactors—not operating—onto planes and flew them over the state to gauge the safety of takeoff and landing. The United States also built one commercial nuclear ship, USS Savannah, but abandoned it as costly, dangerous to bring into populated harbors in case of an accident, and of uncertain value.
Nuclear Renewal—and Nuclear Waste—in the Twenty-First Century
Kurchatov’s dreams of a peaceful domesticated atom in the form of a truly mobile reactor may soon be realized, half a century later, in the boatyards of Sevmash, the Northern Shipbuilding Enterprise, in Severodvinsk. Sevmash, one of five major nuclear shipbuilding yards in Russia dating to the cold war, occupies 750 acres or 1.25 square miles, consists of 100 departments, and employs 25,000 workers. It manufactures household furniture, veneer and solid wood cabinets, windows and doors made mostly from pine, and yachts. Sevmash produced 45 surface ships, 163 submarines (of which 128 were nuclear), 100 tugboats, pontoons, barges, and fishing vessels. With the nearby Zvezdochka shipyard, itself a massive facility, Sevmash now dismantles nuclear submarines and handles the removal, storage, and disposal of spent fuel and the reactor vessel as part of the START agreement to reduce the number of strategic nuclear weapons.
Simultaneously building down from the cold war and building up peaceful nuclear applications, the headlong rush into floating reactors and other such twenty-first-century nuclear technologies ignores persistent perils, one of which is the legacy of nuclear waste dating to the dawn of the nuclear age, which challenges all of the nuclear powers, especially the United States and Russia, to find solutions. Specialists at the Bellona Foundation in Norway have calculated that the majority of Russia’s waste is military in origin, consisting of 177 million tons of ore, work clothes, lab equipment, packaging, building materials, and so on, some 158 million tons of which is uranium tailings held in 274 different facilities, 50 percent of which are still in operation, and only 70 percent of which are securely shielded from the environment; and 465 million cubic meters of liquid radioactive waste at ninety-seven shallow lakes and ponds with a surface area of nearly 50 square miles, enough to cover a major city, and another 50 million cubic meters safely isolated—or one ton of solid waste and two and a half cubic meters of liquid radioactive waste for each Russian citizen.35
High- and low-level, liquid and solid radioactive waste accumulated in astounding quantities in connection with the complex effort to separate the fissile and non-fissile isotopes of uranium from each other, which differ in weight only by the number of neutrons in each nucleus, a process that uses massive industrial facilities and employs thousands of electromagnets, filters, and centrifuges arranged in series that stretch miles in length. The formerly secret facilities initially served as icons of technological achievement but now symbolize the mundane industrial processes of serial production of weapons of mass destruction and grave environmental costs: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Puducah, Kentucky; Krasnoiarsk and Tomsk, Russia; and many others. Another source of the fissile material used in nuclear bombs is plutonium production reactors that harness a chain reaction to transmute the non-fissile isotope of uranium into fissile plutonium. The fuel rods are then moved from the production reactors to concrete canyons where acids attack the steel alloy cladding of the rods, and the plutonium is separated from the dangerous brew of radioisotopes and steel. The first production reactors, many of which operated until the 1980s in the United States and 1990s in Russia, used “once through” cooling: engineers simply pumped water from a nearby river into the reactor, to tame the high temperatures of the chain reaction in the core, and poured the warm, radioactive effluent back into the river. The reason for these simple designs was to maximize production and lower costs. The engineers postponed any determination to handle waste properly, storing it temporarily in tanks and ponds that began to leach radioactivity into the groundwater almost immediately and has continued to do so for the past fifty years.
The most notorious of these facilities are the Maiak plant in Cheliabinsk (now Ozersk), Russia, and the plant in Hanford, Washington. At Maiak, phenomenal levels of radioactivity leaked into the environment, and at least two major accidents spread waste over thousands of square miles and required the evacuation of thousands of residents (see chapter 5), although Rosatom officials today minimize the risk. Radioisotopes from Hanford have entered the Columbia River, and Indians who rely on salmon for their diet have ingested isotopes with them. The Bush administration cut funding for cleanup at Hanford by hundreds of millions of dollars, seeing the necessary process of cleanup as too costly and not as pressing as Washington State residents do, and proposing further hundred million dollar cuts in post-Bush budgets.36
The disposition of spent fuel in Russia similarly remains an unsolved problem, but with an added twist: in 2001 the Russian parliament passed at his urging, and President Putin signed, legislation enabling Rosatom to import spent nuclear fuel. Ministry personnel estimated that receipts might top $30 billion, which they would apply to the tasks of upgrading safety, inventory, and control systems, and especially toward remediation of the frightening legacy of nuclear waste. The Russian waste program permits used fuel rods from nuclear power stations in fourteen countries in Europe and Asia to be imported for storage, but not permanent disposal, and returned after fifty years. About 14,000 tons of an estimated 200,000 tons of the world’s used fuel rods are currently stored in Russia; Russia might import another 20,000 tons of waste. About $10 billion of the $30 billion revenue expected over the next ten years has been earmarked for “special ecological programs for the rehabilitation of radioactively polluted regions,” according to the bill. The remaining $21 billion, a vast sum considering that Russia’s 2001 federal budget totaled $60 billion, will be considered a general source of funds, but many observers believe that it will likely be used by Rosatom to retool and embark on an aggressive new nuclear power program. Further, $10 billion is wholly inadequate to clean up the Soviet Union’s nuclear legacy or ensure safety in planned reactors. And since building a single reactor—based on current French experience—costs more than $5 billion, there is ample reason to anticipate that MinAtom officials will seek to divert funds from cleanup to construction.37 Import has begun, although at a level much lower than anticipated.
At stations in Russia and elsewhere so-called temporary storage facilities for spent fuel rods are full or nearly full, with the rods stored both in basins of borated water, to keep them stable and cool, and increasingly in steel-lined concrete casks (dry cask storage) above ground. Whether in basins or in dry casks above ground, the fuel assemblies make inviting targets for terrorists. Russia’s pressurized water reactors produce 39 tons annually, and its Chernobyltype reactors produce almost 60 tons annually. In all, by 2030 there may be 50,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel in Russia, virtually all in temporary storage facilities at reactor sites.38 Given the presence of thousands of these rods in temporary storage, is Rosatom prepared to import more?
The uncertainties facing nuclear renewal in Russia should remind us that those uncertainties face other nations. In the United States, spent fuel—60,000 tons of it—has accumulated at over 100 nuclear power plants across the nation, currently at 2,000 tons annually; 161 million Americans live within 75 miles of one of these sites. Stored in basins and in concrete casks spread across huge parking lots above ground, the fuel serves as a reminder of the failure of engineers to manage waste safely. At the recently decommissioned Maine Yankee power station,39 located on a scenic inlet of the Sheepscot River, two miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and just outside of Wiscassett, the self-proclaimed “prettiest little town in Maine,” one such lot sits in the open sky under the constant watch of armed guards, surrounded by a fence, surveilled by cameras. The reactor vessel, the jackhammered reinforced concrete from the distinctive dome, and other building materials were loaded onto a barge and shipped to Barnwell, South Carolina, for burial several years ago, but the fuel remains, waiting for a repository to open, the vigilant guards ably monitoring the casks twenty-four hours a day, as I discovered when I took the wrong turn out of the plant after a site visit and found myself meekly facing assault rifles. On an August day, tourist traffic backs up for miles in each direction along Route 1 through Wiscassett, vulnerable should an accident involving a small plane or a terrorist attack rupture casks and eject radioactive debris into the environs. Soon there will be fifty such nuclear fuel parking lots in the United States.
In 2005 the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., released a report criticizing the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and nuclear industry for inadequate attention to the danger of terrorist attack, especially on the spent fuel, whether in casks or in basins. The report took issue with Bush administration contentions that the pools were safe, as well as with the decision of the NRC to classify sections of the report allegedly for security reasons, but in fact to prevent publication of sections of the report that pointed out the dangers, a conclusion that differed with the administration’s pro-nuclear stance.40
Spent nuclear fuel has overwhelmed power plants throughout European Russia as well. The Leningrad Atomic Energy Station (LAES) in Sosnovy Bor, a town of 60,000 inhabitants created to serve four Chernobyl-type reactors in the 1960s, suggests the worn metaphor of the machine in the garden. The reactors sit among pine trees, together with 25,000 spent fuel rods, some fifteen to twenty-five years old, whose zirconium cladding has begun to corrode, in basins a stone’s throw from the Gulf of Finland, with its currents and tides leading to the Baltic and Scandinavian states. Station managers have elected therefore to build carbon dioxide–cooled dry concrete casks for above-ground storage of spent fuel such as those becoming standard as pools fill up at nuclear reactors in the United States. This will require removing the fuel rods from the pools and cutting them to size to fit in the casks. Sawing the rods into pieces could create severe environmental and safety problems. Sergei Kharitonov, a former LAES employee who worked in building 428, the site of the cooling pools, said, “Sawing these rods will release two decades of contamination.” He continued, “These things contain uranium 235 and 238 and weapons grade plutonium. If handled improperly, it could be a catastrophe. It possesses dangers to the workers themselves, and an ecological emergency for the surrounding area.”41
The LAES was the first Chernobyl-type reactor; Chernobyl was considered the best operating and most modern RBMK facility until the disastrous explosion of April 1986. At LAES construction began in 1967; unit 1 came on line in 1973 and unit 2 in 1975. The two newest reactors, which were brought into operation in 1979 and 1981, are second-generation RBMK-1000 (megawatt electric) reactors, considered safer than the first-generation reactors, but still of the Chernobyl design. Each RBMK-1000 has 1,661 fuel assemblies that consist of eighteen fuel pins containing uranium enriched to 2.4 percent. The RMBK has the advantage that when fuel assemblies fail, or in order to refuel, the operation can be conducted without shutting down the reactor. These reactors were used for the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union.
LAES station director, Mikhail Orlov, announced in November 2001 that the service life of the first and second units of the Leningrad nuclear power plant could be extended for a decade without any safety risk. Work has already begun to upgrade safety; $700 million was to have been invested by 2005,42 but I can find no confirmation of such an investment. Around the world, nuclear power station operators and owners have asked to extend operating licenses decades beyond the initial estimates of station lifetimes. The tremendous operating temperatures and pressures in reactors and the influence of radioactivity on the brittleness, creep, and other qualities of reactor materials and components suggest that regulators ought to approve extension, if at all, only in rare circumstances. LAES officials then announced plans to build more reactors at the site, both to expand production and to benefit the town and its workers. This has upset Russian environmentalists and the European community. EU countries have asked Russia to close reactors 1 and 2, considering them unsafe. Leningrad’s unit 3 was retrofitted but has had several incidents, accidents, and outages since the upgrades. The station continues to plug along into the twenty-first century, while emergency shutdowns become standard affairs.43
The decision to build more stations or prolong the life of existing ones will exacerbate a problem with spent fuel. Spent fuel accumulates everywhere—in Russia, in France, in England, in the United States. Only 60 miles southwest of St. Petersburg and its 5 million residents, the worn reactors should have been shut down years ago, but operating licenses have been extended, while plans to build at least four new reactors, one at a time to replace them, move ahead.
If You Build Them, Where Will the Waste Go?
Are floating reactors a viable technology, or do they suggest the need to be certain of the true costs of nuclear renewal before moving ahead? Engineers and other enthusiasts of a nuclear twenty-first century claim today, as they have for fifty years, that nuclear energy will solve problems of tightness in fossil fuel markets. They point out that, in contrast to fossil fuel plants, reactors do not contribute to global warming and do not emit particulate or pollutants into the atmosphere that contribute to heart and lung disease. They assert that they have solved the problems of nuclear safety and cost, perhaps not making energy “too cheap to meter,” as they claimed in the 1950s, but designing inherently stable reactors and getting close to solving the critical problem of committing nuclear waste to safe burial. Yet American and Russian plants suffer from the same challenges of safe operation: siting close to major population centers, premature aging of facilities under the action of high temperatures and radiation “creep,” the potential of a catastrophic meltdown or explosion that endangers hundreds of thousands if not millions of nearby residents, and growing quantities of waste.
Many specialists believe that cleanup and safe storage of military and civilian waste must proceed with adequate funding before nuclear mavens add additional waste to already overburdened facilities, not to mention before building more reactors and producing more fuel. The halting effort of the United States to identify a permanent state-of-the-art waste repository—billions of dollars have been expended on a yet-to-open facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, 60 miles from Las Vegas—indicates that extensive uncertainties plague the nuclear industry, even as presidents and engineers assure the public that limited national resources ought to be spent on floating reactors, and that reactors will free nations from dependence on foreign oil. Although required by federal law—and by common sense—the design and construction of a resting place for such waste as spent fuel rods have been waylaid by legal, environmental, and political concerns.44 In 1982, the U.S. Congress passed legislation to require the Department of Energy to open a waste repository by 1989. Congress stipulated that sites east and west of the Mississippi River be evaluated to ensure fairness in the process, although from the start it was likely that the requirement that a dry, seismically stable site be found meant that a western state would be chosen. Soon, coalitions of congressmen and congresswomen from the northeast and southeast and election politics conspired to leave only western states under consideration. Energy officials focused on Hanford, Washington; Deaf Smith County, Texas; and Yucca Mountain, the last designated by law in 1987, with the president to make the choice final and binding after completion of detailed studies.
Over twenty years, Department of Energy officials produced mounds of evidence for public comment, and they hoped for confirmation of Yucca Mountain, even as they confidently tunneled into the mountain. During a recent tour of the facility, I was impressed by the skill that engineers had demonstrated in drilling into the ground. Yet both Nevada and some Department of Energy officials have now questioned the choice of Yucca Mountain, considering it unsafe and an unfair burden on Nevada, which has no reactors. First, the region has a high level of seismic activity.45 In addition, government scientists may have falsified data on rate of water infiltration at the Yucca site, while Yucca’s main contractor, Bechtel, overestimated the ability to isolate nuclear waste in engineered containers.46 Yet another challenge to safe operation is the transport of 70,000 tons of spent fuel across forty-four states to Yucca Mountain, passing within a half mile of 50 million Americans, through some 703 counties with a total population of 123 million people—over 100,000 shipments in all over three decades, eight every day, mostly by truck.47 Storage casks have been designed to travel well on flatbed trucks and railway cars, past unknowing residents on the way to permanent storage, perhaps to a repository in Nevada. The manufacturers and officials of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission assure us that the casks are long lived and, when entombed for transit, able to withstand a crash, derailment, or an explosion. Yet, given daily automobile and truck accidents and frequent train derailments with chlorine and other volatile chemicals that often require nearby residents to be evacuated, these tens of thousands of trips of nuclear fuel heading for a yet-to-be-opened repository should raise red flags.
Not long ago I sat in the office of the Mayor of Severodvinsk, Alexander Beliaev, a friend; a man devoted to the welfare of his clean, orderly city, much cleaner than other Russian cities; and a man unruffled by the now mundane task of removal of nuclear fuel from submarines and its temporary storage within city limits. Although their population has dropped from 250,000 to 200,000 inhabitants owing to a mass exodus of residents since the fall of the USSR, Severodvinskians remain proud of their nuclear heritage, the submarines they built, the submarines they decommission as part of arms agreements with the United States, the spent fuel they handle within city limits, and the furniture and floating reactors they hope to build. Perhaps one-quarter of residents are pensioners, another quarter children, and the shipbuilding industry remains vital to supporting all of them. Beliaev has often visited the United States, including Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Severodvinsk’s sister city, site of a naval facility with an equally glorious past and waste whose future remains uncertain, where 133 submarines were built, and whose older residents still mourn the loss of the USS Thresher off the coast in 1963 with all 129 men on board lost. The P/S Connection, a citizens group that promotes cultural, educational, art, and business exchanges and promotes discussion of the cold war legacy, works diligently to raise awareness of the environmental costs of the nuclear age. But beyond its official registration as an NGO with the Russian Department of Justice, the P/S Connection remains a temporal entity whose American members must always gain approval of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the inheritor of the KGB, to enter Severodvinsk, and whose Russian members are inclined by local circumstances to favor the construction of PAES for the jobs and electricity they bring.
In the thinking of officials from Rosatom, town fathers of Severodvinsk, engineers at Sevmash, workers at the plant, and federal officials up to former President Putin, floating reactors symbolize the crucial confluence of a glorious indigenous engineering tradition, the continued presence of Russia as a great power—not because of the sale of natural resources but because of its pioneering achievements in space, nuclear energy, and other fields of big science—and the need to keep an entire closed city gainfully employed.
To promote their plans, they have calculated nuclear electrical energy costs at 25–40 percent lower than a fossil fuel station. This ignores the significant cost overruns, which are typical for nuclear power facilities of any nation, and construction time, which is always three to five years longer than estimated if the past is any judge, even if they succeed at standardizing reactor designs and construction practices. Promoters stress the “tax benefits” of the station in new homes, stores, and kindergartens that will be built. They point out how employees will be trained at the local technical university, and that other regional higher educational institutions will open new departments to train them.48
The Russian and American presidents and their closest advisors generally tout nuclear power as a panacea for the world’s energy problems. Yet awareness and criticism of the rejuvenated programs remain muted and dangerously uninformed, in Russia because of the government crackdown on independent expertise, the emasculation of the federal environmental protection service, and weakening of the nuclear inspection agency, in the United States because of fear of overreliance on fossil fuels, and in both countries because of continued engineering hubris, out-of-hand dismissal of public concerns, and the nuclear tradition of underestimating costs and obstacles and overvaluing benefits. Costs and duration of reactor construction have not declined even as standard components and techniques have been introduced, but rather have increased as engineers have encountered new and unexpected challenges regarding safety, stability, repair, and aging of facilities at each step.
When promoters of floating reactors and other vulnerable technologies sanguinely dismiss those public concerns, they ought to consider the warning of one of their own leaders, a founder of reactor technology in the USSR, the engineer Nikolai Dollezhal. In 1981, in a prescient article published in the Communist Party’s leading theoretical journal, Kommunist, Dollezhal warned that the Soviet nuclear energy industry should no longer build stations with scores of reactors located close to major cities, with fuel assemblies and spent fuel moving in and out, past children and mothers, stores and schools, with great uncertainties surrounding safe evacuation in case of an accident—as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl demonstrated, not to mention Katrina and New Orleans, with hundreds of thousands of people trapped behind even though they had three days of warnings to evacuate, not the fifteen minutes one might have in the case of a nuclear accident. Or, consider floating and submersible devices that have sunk in high seas and low, nuclear and not—the Titanic, the Thresher, the Kursk. The Kursk, at 508 feet long, capable of holding twenty-four nuclear missiles, the largest attack submarine ever built, launched in 1994 out of Severodvinsk, sank to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean in 2002, carrying 118 men and two OK650B reactors, each at 190 MW.
Nuclear power may be viable if the public is openly involved in its development, in decisions about where and when to build reactors, and in evaluation of costs. Those costs will include higher than estimated transmission charges to account for siting far from population centers; the claiming of vast areas to ensure huge exclusion zones; additional layers of human, physical, and electronic protection against the risks of terror and accidents; decommissioning; insurance indemnification paid by utilities and owners, not subsidized by governments; safe transport and storage of radioactive waste of all sorts; modernization of unshielded facilities; and cleanup of extensive regions of pollution. The first PAES will be floated out of Sevmash dry docks into the White Sea to serve Severodvinsk in the near future, with a dozen more to be built in the next decade to be moored in bays, estuaries, tidal basins, and inlets around the world, producing electrical energy and heat, perhaps desalinating water, and serving as an inviting target for natural and terrorist disaster. If there were a serious accident at the first PAES, how many of the residents of Severodvinsk would be able to escape exposure to radiation as they fled along the two-lane road to Arhhangelsk, and when might they return home?
Masabikh Akhunov (1928–2008), “Roads,” 1969, linocut. Planners and builders imposed a Cartesian grid of roads, railroads, factories, and cities over the socialist countryside with the goal of making nature itself—and its rivers, streams, and forests—function according to plan. They disposed of waste haphazardly, assuming that economic production was more important than weakness before nature. The environmental costs of this approach will be felt in many regions for decades to come. Courtesy of the Allan Gamborg Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
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