The voyage from Gremikha to Murmansk normally takes one day. This is the same route as the Russian retired submarine K-159 took when it sank northeast of the inlet to the Kola Bay in August 2003. The vessel which is sailing with the highly radioactive spent fuel this week is the 35 year old Serebryanka.
The rusty spent nuclear fuel containers have been stored outdoor at Gremikha for 40 years, posing a grave radiation threat. They contain uranium fuel from some of the Soviet Union’s first nuclear powered submarines, at that time were based at Gremikha. The submarines reloaded their deadly radioactive spent fuel to the onshore open-air storage site.
During the latest years, both Russia and the international society have put much effort into cleaning up the radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel stored at the very remote naval base Gremikha on the eastern shores of the Kola Peninsula. Norway is one of the most active countries cooperating with Russia to secure naval spent nuclear fuel.
Nuclear.ru reports that this week’s shipment contained 294 spent fuel assemblies from first generation submarines. These submarines were in active service in the 60-ties and 70-ties. 294 fuel assemblies correspond to a bit more than one reactor core. Most Soviet, and later Russian, submarines have two reactors each. The uranium fuel in Soviet’s first generation submarines had an assumed uranium enrichment of 21 percent.
The fuel assemblies were retrieved from their containers, put in shrouds and loaded into six special transportation containers, Nuclear.ru reported.
The transport voyage goes to Atomflot in Murmansk where the spent fuel later will be reloaded to special designed casks for railway transport to Russia’s central storage and reprocessing facility at Mayak in the Chelyabinsk region.
As BarentsObserver.com reported in March the spent nuclear fuel shipment from Gremikha to Murmansk goes with the vessel Serebryanka. The old vessel is redesigned for this purpose. Serebryanka was during the 70-ties and 80-ties used by Murmansk Shipping Company to store liquid radioactive waste from the Soviet Union’s fleet of nuclear powered icebreakers based in Murmansk. When the tanks were filled to capacity with liquid radioactive waste, Serebryanka simply left Murmansk and sailed to the north-eastern part of the Barents Sea where the tanks was emptied in the sea.
A scheduled training exercise dealing with radiation safety also takes place at Gremikha today and tomorrow, reports atomic-energy.ru. In addition to Russian emergency organs, observer from both the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authorities and French radiation authorities participates.
