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easily either. So, we knew somewhere in the Arctic up current 

 there was a nuclear reactor doing something. So, it was not a huge 

 surprise when we learned that there were radioactive materials, 

 that there are radioactive materials, and indeed reactors in the 

 Arctic, and that explains some of our funny little oddities in our 

 measurements over the last couple of decades. 



Well, where does this stuff go? When does it get released? What 

 does it do when it gets to wherever it gets to? And who cares? 

 These questions have been of interest to us and to myself for a long 

 time. My expertise is in the physics of sediment transport. Much 

 of the material coming from these radioactive, these reactors, will 

 be bound up in the particles, the particles will move with the 

 water, so it's important to know which way the water goes, obvi- 

 ously. 



There is a great deal of knowledge about how rapidly the sedi- 

 ments on the bottom scavenge or cleanse the water as they pass 

 through and they pick up the radioactive materials, and much of 

 it ends up in the mud, except for the more soluble forms of cesium 

 and strontium which have a longer pathway, if you will. 



We spend a lot of our professional life at Woods Hall trying to 

 figure out how material moves around and the water moves 

 around, and we think the issue at hand here is the material in the 

 Barents Sea on its way to Alaska or, if not, where is it going. I 

 don't think it takes a great leap of faith to realize that we need to 

 know probably, first, and this would be my first step, and that is 

 to find out where the reactors are that contain the fiiel rods. That's 

 probably the most dangerous part of the equation right now, that 

 is the fuel rods or the high level material inside the reactors. How 

 it's been reported that there are of the order 10, 12, 15 reactors sit- 

 ting in various places around Novaya Zemlya and perhaps other 

 places in that neck of the woods, and that a fairly small number 

 are supposed to have fuel rods in them. 



So to me, just as a first order scientific question, is how soon will 

 water pass into the reactor through the fuel rods and out into the 

 ocean. Now I don't myself have any expertise in how the Russians 

 have made their reactors, but it would seem a logical thing to find 

 out, to ask them or perhaps some of our own Navy sources know 

 more about it than — well, I think we may have some information 

 that would be very useful; let's put it that way. And the question 

 is, where are the reactors weak, where's the water going to come 

 in, and how long will it take before the water enters the reactor 

 and starts corroding and eroding the fiiel rods themselves. That to 

 me would be the first thing to do rather than any sort of emotional, 

 by God, we've got to go pick them up, clean them up. I've spent a 

 lot of my career worrying about the Thresher and the Scorpion. In 

 fact, I have the reports on what we've learned about the radioactive 

 release fi*om our own two nuclear submarines that went down 

 accidently and came down and made a heck of a mess. And most 

 of the submarine imploded; the two sides of a submarine coming 

 together and going past each other out the other side is not a pret- 

 ty sight. But the reactor vessels themselves don't seem to be in 

 that bad of shape, and we've been measuring the sample; we've 

 been measuring the mud and the animals growing on, in, near and 

 under the reactors that are on the bottom that we own, and we find 



