Russian nuclear submarines decommissioned, but reactor compartments still contain highly radioactive trash

Last three reactor compartments soon off the water https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/ecology/2018/10/last-three-reactor-compartments-soon-water#.W8P-hlNi_4E.facebook25-years with safe decommissioning of Cold War submarines in the Russian north will come to an end next year. By Thomas Nilsen, October 14, 2018

120 nuclear-powered submarines sailing in-and-out from the Kola Peninsula during the Cold War have been properly decommissioned since the early 1990s. While most of the metal could be recycled, the still-highly radioactive reactor compartments had to be secured for long-term storage.

Intermediate, that meant storing the compartments floating at piers until they could be taken onshore at the central storage complex in Saida Bay, north of Murmansk on the coast of the Barents Sea.

In 2017, the Barents Observer reported that 15 compartments were still kept afloat on the water.

Today, only three reactor compartments remain and they will be taken onshore in 2019, Izvestia reports with reference to the northwestern branch of RosRao, Russia’s state owned company for handling radioactive.

The three compartments are today stored at piers in Saida Bay, while 117 compartments are stored on the huge concrete pad.

RosRao’s Chief Engineer says the very last reactor compartment t be taken onshore is the one from the “Kursk” submarine that sant in the Barents Sea in August 2000 during a naval exercise. The submarine was lifted from the seabed two years after and the remaining parts of the hull were scrapped.

In Saida Bay, the reactor compartments will have to be stored for onshore for many decades before the radioactivity have come down to levels acceptable for cutting the reactors’ metal up and pack it for final geological disposal.

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How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

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