[sacw] (SAAN Post) Lessons from the 'kursk' Catastrophe

Harsh Kapoor aiindex@mnet.fr
Thu, 31 Aug 2000 13:19:33 +0200


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South Asians Against Nukes Post
31 August 2000
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Appeared in "The Times of India", August 30, 2000

PLAYING WITH NUCLEAR FIRE

LESSONS FROM THE 'KURSK' CATASTROPHE

By PRAFUL BIDWAI

In March 1994, Aleksandr Nikitin, then a 44 year-old former submarine
captain, published a report on the appalling state of safety in Russia's
Northern Fleet, which handles the bulk of the country's nuclear-powered
submarines. Using publicly available information, he painstakingly
documented the Fleet's declining operation and maintenance standards,
accumulating and overflowing radioactive waste, steeply falling budgets and
morale, and the growing scarcity of spares, and warned of a series of
disasters. Nikitin was arrested in February 1995 and charged with espionage
and treason, punishable with death. Detained for months without trial,
Nikitin was not allowed to choose his own lawyer. Finally, last year, he
was acquitted by the courts, but now faces another trial on the same charge=
.

Welcome to the Kafkaesque world of nuclear weapons and submarines! The
Kursk tragedy hasn't ended. The submarine's two nuclear reactors, with a
380 MW output, still lie108 metres deep inside a damage hull amidst
torpedoes, high explosives and other hazardous material. They contain an
estimated 1,200 kg of highly enriched uranium, mostly U-235, with a
half-life of a mind-boggling 710 million years. Therefore, huge quantities
of the radioisotope will continue to menace the marine environment and
humans for millions of generations to come. Even assuming that the reactors
were not damaged by the explosives that sank the sub, which seems unlikely,
dismantling the potent cocktail of uranium, hundreds of fission products
including deadly plutonium, and chemical explosives, will entail large
radioactivity exposures. The job will be incomparably more onerous than
accessing the sub's rear hatch--a week-long, super-expensive,
multi-national effort. Abandoning the sub would mean leaching radioactivity
into the environment.

The Kursk is only one disaster that Nikitin forecast. "Much bigger ones
are waiting to happen around Murmansk and Severomorsk", he told me two
months ago in Stockholm. This severely depressed area of the Kola Peninsula
holds 21,000 nuclear fuel assemblies and one-fifth of the world's 1,200
nuclear reactors--in patently unsafe, rapidly deteriorating, conditions.
More than 200 reactors are literally rotting aboard 110 submarines which
have been taken out of service. (About 180 Russian subs have been
decommissioned). The Fleet, which receives less than half its designated
minimum budget, has no money to dismantle the nuclear cores. Indeed, "it
often lacks money to buy rations for the crew", says Nikitin, whose case
this writer has followed since 1995. The result: scores of subs are
corroding and sinking as their reactor compartments fill with
water--presaging an ecological catastrophe. As bankrupt Russia's military
budgets shrink--now to less than half the level of India's--training,
maintenance and safety norms plummet further, making disaster likelier in
the world's largest nuclear arsenal.

Russia's specific troubles are only one part of the nuclear submarine
story. The other two parts are generic. Nuclear submarines everywhere are
extraordinarily disaster-prone. And nuclear establishments everywhere
operate secretively, irrationally and in paranoid ways. Nuclear subs have
had serious accidents ever since they drove the Cold War's most furious
phase of arms racing, in which safety hardly mattered. Today, wreckages of
American and British as well as Russian subs lie on the earth's ocean
floor. There have been numerous accidents aboard US, France, British and
Russian submarines. "Greenpeace" has documented 121 "incidents" in the last
case, 10 of which caused reactor damage. There were also two core
meltdowns--a nuclear reactor's maximum accident--in 1979 and 1989. Nuclear
subs have inherent safety problems because they (like bombs) pack huge
amounts of energy in small volumes and operate in conditions much harsher
than civilian power reactors, themselves seriously accident-prone. A small
error gets magnified into a big crisis.

The authorities' handling of the Kursk crisis further compounded the
catastrophe. They first denied, and then tried to deflect attention from,
its gravity. For four critical days, they refused offers of foreign
assistance out of hubris and "national pride". President Putin refused to
cut short his holiday. The British and Norwegians too delayed sending in
assistance. Russia's nucleocracy refused to disclose relevant information,
including the sailors' names, the sub's location, and the accident's
circumstances. According to independent sources, there were two internal
explosions, not a major collision, as claimed. Journalists had to bribe
naval officers to get the victims' list. Their number too was raised
without explanation from 116 to 118. When relations confronted them, the
bosses used KGB/CIA-style methods: forcibly injecting sedatives to silence
questioners.

Such sordid behaviour is typical of all nuclear establishments. Whether in
the US or USSR, France or Iraq, China or Pakistan, these all-male "Dr
Strangelove outfits" are marked by excessive secrecy and dominated by
unaccountable "experts" who cynically exploit their privileged access to
information. Secrecy cuts across the democracy-dictatorship barrier. For 40
years, the US refused to divulge facts about its terrifying radiation
experiments on humans, including injections of poisons. The N-5 have always
suppressed or denied unpleasant facts about their nuclear programmes.
Transparency and nuclear activities just don't jell. Nuclearism, with its
bellicose "national security" mindset, its crude male-supremacism, its
coarse social-Darwinism, its abiding faith in violence and mass
destruction, has little use for effete, "effeminate" or "idealistic" things
like human rights, social/gender justice or decency. Nuclear weapons and
democratic accountability are mutually antagonistic.

All this applies a fortiori to India. The Atomic Energy Act (1962) betrays
utter contempt for accountability. It allows arbitrary suppression of all
information
--patently unconstitutional, according to V.K. Krishna Iyer. The atomic
energy department (DAE) is easily one of our most secretive. It has much to
hide: uranium mining hazards in Jadugoda, excessive irradiation of
power-plant workers, waste mismanagement, numbers regarding explosive
yields...Worse, we have our own Nikitin: former Captain B.K. Subba Rao who
too was charged in 1988 with spying and jailed for 20 months--until fully
exonerated by three courts. His real crime? Questioning the DAE's nuclear
sub (Advanced Technology Vessel) project, a spectacular Rs. 2,000 crore
failure. Evidence of "espionage"? His IIT-Bombay Ph.D thesis.

However, we have an additional, special problem: unacceptably poor,
sub-Russian safety and reliability in India's nuclear and defence
establishments--witness 202 Air Force plane crashes in nine years, the Main
Battle Tank project mess, the Purulia arms drop, the distinction of having
six of the world's 10 dirtiest nuclear reactors; or for that matter,
industrial and road accident rates four to 12 times the OECD average. It
won't do to deny, Russian-style, India's poor safety culture and
disaster-proneness. We can't even run power-grids and surface transport
safely. It would be disastrous to let hubris drive us towards nuclear
catastrophe. We must freeze our nuclear and missile programmes and return
to the global disarmament agenda.--end--