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Greenpeace Severodvinsk Repon 



I. Introduction 



On October the 1st and 2nd. Greenpeace campaigners visited the city of Severodvinsk -- 

 the first time that an outside environmental group was allowed into this naval city which houses 

 the Soviet Union's major nuclear submarine building and repair plants. 



Severodvinsk is a closed city of 250,000 people, located in the north of the Soviet Union 

 near Arkhangelsk. Since 1938. it has been a center of naval construction. The city contains the 

 world's largest nuclear powered submarine shipyard and a major submarine overhaul, repair and 

 nuclear reactor refuelling facility. The Soviet Union's first nuclear-powered submarines were built 

 in Severodvinsk in the late 1950s, and the world's largest submarines, the 18.500 ton Typhoon 

 class ballistic missile submarines, were constructed there. 



The visit to Severodvinsk was part of an investigation into the environmental impact of 

 the Soviet nuclear navy carried out by Greenpeace campaigners over the past year, in the nonh 

 (Murmansk and Severodvinsk) and in the Far East (Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk) of the Soviet 

 Union. On September the 23 and 24, Greenpeace hosted a conference in Moscow which brought 

 people from naval nuclear ports around the Soviet Union together with western representatives. 

 The seminar disclosed new information atxjut the dumping of Soviet naval nuclear radioactive 

 waste at sea. 



In Severodvinsk, Greenpeace campaigners met City Council members, the Chief of Staff 

 of the White Sea naval base, Vice-Admiral N. P. Pakhomov, the vice-director of the Severodvinsk 

 industrial complex and head of the repair and refuelling facility, N. Y. Kalistratov. and radiological 

 safety and environmental specialists from the Navy, industrial plants and city. The trip was 

 arranged with the help of city council members and Alexander F. Emelyanenkov, Peoples's 

 Deputy for the Arkhangelsk region, and with the permission of the USSR Ministry of Defense. 



The meetings covered radiation safety, radioactive waste handling procedures, accident 

 plans, decommissioning programs, health effects, and defense conversion plans. 



n. A number of problems emerged: 



- monitoring carried out by the City Environmental Committee shows that radioactive 

 material has migrated outside the nuclear submarine plant. But monitoring within the plant itself 

 is not allowed by the military; 



- Civilian authorities are not notified of accidents at the plant or aboard submarines, and 

 contingency plans for an accident on a nuclear submarine are kept secret from them. 



- Health data from the city region is unreliable. Better data is needed to understand the 

 health impact of the plant on the local population. 



- Submarine production is falling at the plant, but there are no coherent plans for defense 



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