(October 30, 1992) On 21 October, after nine days under Russian detention, the Greenpeace ship SOLO was released near Murmansk. The ship had been arrested in the Kara Sea the previous week (12 Oct.).
(381.3732) WISE Amsterdam - The SOLO was on a mission to document submarine nuclear reactor dumps off the coast of the Russian nuclear testing site Novaya Zemlya and had been chased by a Russian coastguard vessel after it entered Russian territorial waters. Three flares were fired at the ship when the captain, Albert Kuiken of the Netherlands, refused to alter SOLO's course. By the time the ship was arrested, however, it had already entered international waters.
Days before the SOLO reached the Kara Sea, Greenpeace released a report which estimated that the waters around Novaya Zemlya contained the largest nuclear sea dump in the world. The former Soviet navy has been secretly dumping nuclear submarine reactors there, some still fully-fuelled, since the early 1960s. The expedition was to document some of the radioactivity around the site.
A government sponsored Russian-Norwegian scientific expedition, which aimed to investigate the extent of radioactive contamination in the same area, was also denied access to the dump sites in September.
Meanwhile, on 14 October, another Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, sailed into Chazma Bay, the site of a 1985 nuclear submarine accident. It was greeted by a crowd of hundreds of people from the town of Dunay.
Chazma Bay, near Vladivostok, was the site of a nuclear reactor explosion in August 1985 during the refuelling of an Echo II submarine. The accident killed 10 sailors and released hundreds of thousands of curies of radioactivity. Until last year, when Greenpeace activists visited the area, the world did not know about the accident. The release of radioactivity created a plume six km long and 1.5 km wide. During a tour of the fallout trace last year, Greenpeace measured radiation at 100 times background levels.
Many of the hundreds of people from the town of Dunay C which provides the workforce for the nuclear submarine shipyard C who met the ship complained to Greenpeace about military secrecy, the accident, lack of radiation control at the shipyard, and the dangerous concentration of military bases in the area.
Although the Rainbow Warrior had received an invitation from the city authorities and permission from the regional KGB to visit Chazma, the commander of the local flotilla, Captain Alexi Krasnikov, attempted to force the ship to leave. He claimed the ship violated navigational rules. But during a public meeting held dockside, Captain Krasnikov was angrily confronted by the crowd about the secrecy surrounding nuclear leakages and accidents, the poor living conditions, plans for a new nuclear dumpsite, and his authority to challenge the Rainbow Warrior's visit. Krasnikov eventually agreed the Rainbow Warrior had not infringed any regulations, and the ship left Chazma Bay without incident.
The Rainbow Warrior is visiting Russian Far East naval bases to expose the deadly legacy of nuclear submarine operations in the Pacific. The US and Russia operate almost 100 nuclear-powered vessels in the region. Already, Greenpeace has uncovered information about two Soviet nuclear-powered submarines which experienced reactor meltdowns in the Pacific, and is confirming reports about radioactive waste dumped near Vladivostok in the Sea of Japan.
"In the last year we learned that 12 submarine nuclear reactors and thousands of barrels of radioactive waste were dumped in Arctic waters," said Joshua Handler, Nuclear Free Seas campaign research coordinator. "Now we are confirming a similar story of secret dumping in the Pacific. The legacy of nuclear submarine operations is truly shocking."
A 1990 explosion at an ammunition dump scattered shells into the town and the shipyard, near the nuclear-powered submarines undergoing repair.
Sources: Greenpeace (GreenNet, gn:gp.press, 13, 14, 18 and 21 Oct. 1992).
Contacts: Greenpeace Moscow, PO Box 60, Moscow, CIS; tel: +7 095 258 3950 or 251 0973. Rainbow Warrior, tel: +872 130 0312, fax: 130 0313.