Main road to BTB. Directly - storehouse # 5, on the right - building # 1
The consequences of the accident on the basis of the storage of spent nuclear fuel in the Murmansk region, which happened twenty-eight years ago, have not yet been eliminated. Facts are forgotten. The liquidators are dying. The great nuclear power has not yet reached the radioactive "garbage" in an amount equivalent to 50 echelons
To a non-military person, the abbreviation BTB does not say anything. The military, meanwhile, know: sending someone to serve at the BTB - a coastal technical base - is the same as sending … three letters. And not because these objects were originally created near the devil, but because these places are not good: since the beginning of the 60s of the last century, stocks of fresh and spent nuclear fuel from nuclear submarines have been stored at such bases. They also stored liquid and solid radioactive waste (LRW and SRW).
Alkashovka-569
Andreeva Bay is located five kilometers from Zaozersk. Where exactly this lip is - you can look at Wikipedia and on a Google map. I can only say that even submariners got there only by boat from their base or along a road blocked by several checkpoints.
BTB-569 has always been a bad name in Andreeva Bay. Submariners called her a drunkard: unreliable people were exiled there - written off for drunkenness, unstable "along the party line", quarreled with the authorities … This place was forgotten not only by God, but also by all types of authorities.
Therefore, life on 569 in the mid-80s proceeded according to its own laws and customs.
Some of its features were told to me by those who had a chance to serve there. A sailor from Lithuania entered "history": he drove moonshine, which he provided for the entire flotilla. (They say, by the way, that there was not a single case of poisoning.) Another craftsman melted down German anti-tank mines (there are a lot of them in those battle places after the war) and sold explosives to Murmansk bandits. Another "specialist", the son of a seasoned convict, set up an underground dental office right in the boiler room, where he made teeth from a randolev ribbon ("gypsy gold") - there was no end to the patients.
I myself have not been to the BTB in Andreeva Bay, but I have a good idea of both the base and its former inhabitants. Because on exactly the same BTBs of the Pacific Fleet, that in the Sysoev Bay in the Primorsky Territory and in the Krasheninnikov Bay in Kamchatka, I have been more than once. I remember the sailors and officers who did not part with the dosimeters, the sad state of the facilities themselves and the specific problems of these “bad places”. No one has ever kept statistics on deaths: in the cards of radiation doses, underestimated indicators were often recorded, and the cards themselves were not handed out to either officers or sailors.
Judging by the official reports of departmental specialists (and others are not allowed there), at such bases everything was always under control. Only occasionally did rumors of individual "troubles" leak out. Serious accidents in the mid-80s were out of the question - in the sense of mentioning them, especially in the Soviet media. Until now, very few people know about them. And the further - the less they know. Because the facts are forgotten, the liquidators die.
The BTB-569 is still in its place with all its eerie contents and, unfortunately, many of the problems of nearly thirty years of aging.
Lieutenant Commander Anatoly Safonov, whom I met in Obninsk, was one of the leaders of the liquidation of the consequences of the accident that happened at the BTB in Andreeva Bay in 1982. He served there as a group commander from 1983 to 1990, during the period of major reconstruction work.
On the bulging naval eye
“Storage number 5,” he says, “was put into operation in 1962. It was designed for wet storage (in pools) of 550 canisters with spent nuclear fuel (SNF). However, it soon became clear that this capacity was not enough. Therefore, in 1973, an extension was made to the building for another 2,000 covers. The construction battalions were working.
When Safonov first saw this extension, he was horrified. A huge building with no windows, electrical equipment in disrepair, a leaky roof. In many places, there are colossal levels of beta particle pollution. Since he was responsible for receiving, storing and dispatching spent nuclear fuel to the Mayak chemical plant from this very storage facility, he thoroughly studied the building. And I discovered that over 20 years of operation, things were happening here, fantastic in their negligence. The covers broke off and fell to the bottom of the pool. How many of them there were in fact - no one knew. The account was kept through the stump of the deck. From time to time they were taken out of the pools and taken to the "Mayak". Containers piled on top of each other with highly radioactive material threatened with big trouble, up to the occurrence of a spontaneous chain reaction - a nuclear explosion, only "small".
By the way, the building on the BTB in Krasheninnikov Bay in Kamchatka and in the Sysoev Bay in Primorye, where I happened to visit, was built in the same years as the BTB in Andreeva Bay. And using the same "technology". I got the impression that in the minds of the performers of the atomic project and thoughts did not arise to link into a single chain: "a secret meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU - a drawing board of a scientist - construction of a nuclear-powered ship - construction of storage facilities - construction of apartments for submariners and personnel of infrastructure facilities - utilization of submarines and radioactive waste" … The chain was broken after the launching of nuclear submarines (nuclear submarines). Further - in Russian, how it goes.
The nuclear submarine was designed and built by the smartest scientists and engineers of our country. The storehouses are few or not at all uneducated construction battalions. The designers of the nuclear submarine took into account all the little things in such a complex organism as a boat. The vaults contain cranes, shackles, pendants, bayonet locks on covers and much more, worked anyhow.
And then February 1982. Water suddenly began to drain from the attached pool. The decrease in the level was noticed by accident: by the ice on the wall of the building. A highly radioactive liquid has flowed into the Barents Sea. How many of it got there, no one knew for sure, because there was no device for measuring the water level. For this purpose, a sailor was used: every two hours he entered the danger zone with a long stick and with it measured the water level in the pool. At the same time, the power of gamma radiation in that place reached 15-20 roentgens / hour.
Noticing the leak, at first they poured … flour into the pool. The ancient naval method of sealing cracks was recalled by the chief of staff of the BTB. Then he proposed to launch a diver into the pool, where the radiation level reached 17,000 roentgens. But someone wisely advised not to.
Sacks of flour, of course, did not work. We decided to just watch the process for a while. Approximately, or as they say in the navy, "by the bulging naval eye", it was calculated that in April 1982 the total leakage reached 150 liters per day. Radiation measurements were recorded more accurately: gamma background on the outer wall - 1.5 roentgens / hour, gamma background in the basement of the storage - 1.5 roentgen / hour, soil activity - about 2x10 curies / liter.
In September, the flow reached 30-40 tons per day (for the same "bulging eye"). There is a real danger of exposing the upper parts of the fuel assemblies. The water, which played the role of biological protection, is gone. This caused a sharp increase in the gamma background and created a real threat to personnel.
Then they installed iron-lead-concrete floors over the pool. Fonilo is still strong, but it allowed to work. During the shift, the sailors and officers working at the facility gained up to 200 millirems - a fifth of the rem, at a rate of 5 rem per year.
Hiroshima death block
In the fall of 1982, it was decided to urgently unload the spent fuel from the left pool (they had already spat on the right one - there the water finally flowed away): from where, too, water began to leave. It was topped up along the fire hoses stretched out from the boiler room (the same one where the convict's son made teeth from randol).
At the same time, casks with spent nuclear fuel were hastily dispatched in trains to the Chelyabinsk chemical plant "Mayak". At the same time, the construction of a temporary dry storage facility began at an accelerated pace - the dry storage unit (a dry storage unit - it is, in naval terminology, "Hiroshimny death block"). Abandoned and unused containers for liquid radioactive waste (LRW) were adapted for this case. Why unused? Because LRW has long been dumped from tankers in the area of Novaya Zemlya.
The spent nuclear fuel was reloaded into metal pipes, placed in containers, the space between the pipes was filled with concrete. Calculated: container number 3a - for 900 cases; numbers 2a and 2b - for 1200 covers. 240 cells were used for the burial of contaminated clothing, rags, and fluorescent instruments.
In Russia today there are 1,500 sites for the temporary storage of radioactive waste, which have already accumulated about 550 million tons. There is still no serious legal basis to regulate all issues related to their safe storage.
It was planned that the spent nuclear fuel would stay in this state for 3-4 years. Before the construction of a normal storage facility.
The casings with degrading spent nuclear fuel have been in this very state for 28 years.
By the way, the true causes of the accident were never established. The following versions remained: poor quality of welded seams of pool cladding; movements of rocky ground, due to which the welds cracked; sharp temperature fluctuations in water, which led to the creation of temperature stresses in the welded seams; and finally, the assumption that the left pool leaked due to distortions formed as a result of covering the right pool with biological protection with a huge weight.
The official announcement of this accident was first published in April 1993 in a report by the Government Commission on issues related to the disposal of radioactive waste at sea, under the leadership of President Boris Yeltsin's environmental adviser Alexei Yablokov.
I had to write about fires on the ships of the Navy: there emergency parties act quickly, the count goes to seconds (for example, if there is a possibility of an explosion of ammunition), people are in “visible” danger. And the radiation is not visible. Well, the water flows and flows. Only specialists can realistically assess the full extent of the threat.
Safonov recalls that in connection with the current situation, the entire leadership of the BTB and the Northern Fleet was very frightened. The possibility of a nuclear explosion was assumed. One of the largest experts in the field of nuclear safety was invited for consultations. After a detailed study of the issue on the spot, he literally said the following: “I am practically sure that a nuclear explosion will not occur in the process of pulling away a nuclear-dangerous blockage. But the likelihood that spontaneous chain reactions (SCR) will begin in the process of work on this blockage, I did not exclude. Later, I saw blue flashes several times. These were small nuclear explosions."
All work on unloading the left pool was carried out by BTB staff and was completed in September 1987. The liquidators removed more than 1114 canisters (i.e., at least 7800 spent fuel assemblies), moreover, a significant part from the bottom of the pool.
Why did the work take so long? Due to the constant breakdowns of ancient lifting mechanisms, frail electrical equipment, and decrepit cables that had to be replaced, the strongest drop in the water level (instead of the required six meters, for example, it dropped to four). All this, says Anatoly Nikolaevich, inevitably led to an increase in the gamma background at workplaces and, as a result, to the personnel receiving unjustifiably high doses of overexposure.
According to Safonov's assumption, not three thousand, as was later officially announced, flowed out into the Barents Sea, but up to 700 thousand tons of highly radioactive water.
… We are sitting in his small apartment in Obninsk. Anatoly Nikolayevich hands me a book he wrote in co-authorship with Captain 1st Rank Alexander Nikitin about these events - the circulation is tiny. He shows photographs and periodically looks at the site (https://andreeva.uuuq.com/) dedicated to the accident, which was created by the former submariner Ivan Kharlamov: are there any new messages from fellow liquidators there. From these messages, he learns that another sailor or officer has died. He died of diseases caused by overexposure.
- For me, it still remains a mystery, - says Safonov, - how my crane operators saw and understood the commands of the shift supervisors from a distance of sometimes more than 40 meters, being in the crane cabin at a height of about 20 meters. Once I watched a competition of truck crane operators on TV, they were pushing the extended part of a matchbox from 15 meters. My guys Alexander Pronin and Konstantin Krylov from the first time, in conditions of high radioactivity and poor visibility, fell with a cover - a cassette with a diameter of 24.2 cm with spent nuclear fuel - into a cell with a diameter of 25 cm from a distance of 43 meters. This is a truly fantastic result, worthy of being included in the Guinness Book of Records.
Krylov participated in the elimination of cascade (one after another) radiation accidents. Two months after being transferred to the reserve, he died. Safonov learned about this from an email from his friend Vasily Kolesnichenko.
“There was no proper medical control over the state of people's health,” continues Safonov. - There was not enough protective clothing. And the equipment of the liquidators was no different from the clothes of the prisoners: a quilted jacket, tarpaulin boots, or oak felt boots. In order not to blow out the lower back, they were girded with ropes. We ate poorly:
Fourteen healthy young sailors, after working in dangerous areas, at three o'clock in the morning, ate a bucket of potatoes and several cans of sprat in tomato sauce. They ate with rubber gloves. They also slept in them. The bodies did not lend themselves to decontamination. Worked in Andreeva Bay and the seconded construction battalions - two companies. They worked around the clock. They were fed even worse than us. As an additional ration, we used leftovers from our table, which were intended for pigs in a subsidiary farm …
It happened, Safonov recalls, when a crane lifted the emergency cover of a cassette with spent nuclear fuel, nuclear fuel was poured from it directly onto the concrete. "Luminary" from this "garbage" up to 17,000 roentgens per hour. The sailors cleaned it with a shovel and a broom. The work was carried out without representatives of the nuclear security service (SNS) of the Ministry of Defense - there was no control on their part. Of course, these were the monstrous games of man with death.
