Shipload of spent radioactive fuel from Gremikha arrives Murmansk
The specially modernized vessel “Serebryanka” has arrived at Atomflot’s harbor facilities in Murmansk with six containers of spent nuclear submarine fuel from Gremikha.
Built in 1974, Serebryanka is intended for loading, temporary storage, transport, and offloading of liquid radioactive waste. The vessel has been modernized to transport containers with highly radioactive materials, Murmansk Vestnik reports. The containers will be loaded on trains for further transportation to the Mayak reprocessing plant in the South-Urals.
Gremikha is located on the eastern shore of the Kola Peninsula and is the second largest of the two onshore facilities used by the Russian Northern Fleet to store its radioactive waste. Located 350 kilometers off the Kola Inlet near Murmansk, Gremikha is not connected to the rest of the peninsula by roads. Andreyeva Bay is the other naval nuclear waste dump, located 45 kilometers east of the Norwegian border.
Over the years, Gremikha has accumulated around 800 spent nuclear fuel assemblies from first-generation Soviet submarines and six reactor cores with liquid metal-coolant taken out of Alpha class submarines, Bellona reports.
The first spent nuclear fuel was delivered to Gremikha in the early 1960s after Russia’s first nuclear-powered submarines underwent their first refuelling. For more than 40 years, this waste was hoarded up at an open-air storage facility, posing a grave radiation threat. Besides the spent nuclear fuel, in storage at Gremikha are also substantial quantities of radioactive waste: various equipment, used ion-exchange materials and other tools, as well as storage containers – all bearing very high levels of radioactive contamination.
The storage facility in Gremikha has been hit by several accidents during the years. Bellona mentions that in July 2003, 12 workers suffered various radiation doses while cleaning up an undocumented storage site littered with solid radioactive waste. The irradiated workers were sent to a medical examination only a month after the incident. The base made international headlines on August 30th, 2003, when the submarine K-159 sank in the Barents Sea while being towed to the Polyarny shipyard near Murmansk, killing nine of the 10 crew members on board. The submarine, which was still loaded with spent nuclear fuel, sank in 240 meters of water.
