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Greenpeace Vladivostok Report 

 6 November 1991 



suspicious of the Navy's account of the acddent and its reassurances. Local residents were eager 

 to have more and reliable information about the accident, particularly about the health effects on 

 people in the area at the time of the accident, the clean-up workers, and the population living in 

 the area. 



V. Other Submarine Accidents 



No other information about specific Pacific Fleet submarine accidents was forthcoming 

 from the Navy officers. They denied reports about an accident which was rumored to have 

 happened around 1988, where a submarine scrapped its bottom on rocks in the Peter the Great 

 Bay and leaked radioactivity when it came into Bolshoi Kamen. 



However, further details were uncovered about the 1968 accident on board the liquid- 

 metal cooled Northern Fleet submarine. 



One of the senior naval officers, who had worked in the Northern Fleet from the early 

 1970s to the mid-1980s and had dealt directly with questions of radiation safety, confirmed that 

 the accident had happened. He added, that many men were severely irradiatod, and many of the 

 crew were retired after the accident. The captain of the submarine was quite "illiterate." After 

 the accident, the crew had dinner as usual and proceeded back to base seemingly at a normal 

 rate, and pulled up to the dock without any special precautions. Thus people at the dockside 

 were also irradiated. 



He refused to explicitly confirm the reactor was subsequently dumped off Novaya Zemlya. 

 But he said Greenpeace's description of its disposal was not entirely incorrect 



He also noted, the frozen lead-bismuth coolant is a major alpha emitter. He said it can 

 only be removed with a Tiammer and chisel" type operation, hazarding workers with high levels of 

 radiation. 



VI. Submarine refuelling, decommissioning and radioactive waste disposal and contamination 

 A. Refuelling 



The information provided about refuelling paralleled what Greenpeace learned in visits to 

 Murmansk and Severodvinsk about the Northern Fleet A refuelling ship comes along submarine 

 and removes the spent fuel with a special crane apparatus. Fuel is temporarily stored in the 

 refuelling ship. As soon as the storage area aboard the support ship is full, the spent fuel is 

 offloaded to a coastal storage site. The length of time it is stored there, before it is shipped to 

 Chelyabinsk for disposal, depends on when the reactor was stopped before refuelling. If it had 

 been stopped a long time, then its activity is lower and so the ftiel can be stored a shorter time, 

 and if it was stopped just before refuelling then the fuel needs to be stored longer before 



