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This generation may no longer remember that for a few months spinach and other green vegetables had to be destroyed in countries like the Netherlands and Germany, that cows all over Europe needed to be kept in stables and milk taken out of consumption — and that for more than two decades, reindeer in Lapland, sheep in the English Lake District and wild boar in the German Schwarzwald had to be slaughtered because of high radioactive contamination.
In the countries that took the biggest hit — Belarus, Ukraine and Russia — hundreds of square kilometres are still too polluted for people to return, and several million people in a wider circle continue to have to accept radioactive contamination as a daily risk. At the site of the catastrophe, the international community only last year sufficiently covered the exploded reactor to enable the start of clean-up work — which requires technology we do not yet have. Since the 26th of April, 1986, we know from direct experience that there are severe risks attached to nuclear power.
A floating nuclear plant? Seriously?In the coming weeks, Russian nuclear moloch Rosatom plans to move the world’s first designated floating nuclear power plant, the ‘Akademik Lomonosov’, from St. Petersburg through the Baltic Sea and around Norway to Murmansk. In Murmansk, it will be loaded with nuclear fuel and tested at a few kilometres distance from nearly 300-thousand inhabitants.
Originally, Rosatom planned to load fuel and test the ‘Akademik Lomonosov’ in the very centre of St. Petersburg, 2.3 kilometres from the famous St. Isaac Cathedral.
What could possibly go wrong?
This caused a plaintive whine from the Russian nuclear regulator, Rostechnadzor, but because of a hole in Russian nuclear law, inspectors still don’t have full access or a mandate to criticise the Lomonosov. Only a petition by twelve-thousand St.Petersburg citizens, questions in the city’s legislative assembly and major concerns from Baltic Sea countries about transporting two reactors filled with irradiated fuel, without its own propulsion, along their rocky coasts, caused Rosatom to use some common sense and shift loading plans to a less densely populated area.
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