Saturday, June 02, 2007

If you were planning to visit Northern Europe in the future you might want to go now, while it is still there

From The Scotsman:

SUSPENDED from the ceiling, they are covered in deadly radioactive material that drops off them in lumps to the wet floor beneath. The 20,000 fuel rods contained in three tanks at the Andreeva Bay storage site once held enough nuclear energy to power Russia's entire submarine fleet.

Now, cracks in the concrete walls of the dilapidated tanks have allowed seawater and rainwater to seep in and corrode the lethal contents.

The situation is so bad Russia's nuclear agency has warned rods at the site could explode in an "uncontrolled chain reaction", according to a Norwegian environmental group, which says it has a leaked copy of a report.

Experts say that could set off an explosion scattering radioactive material across northern Europe, reaching even as far as Britain, in an environmental catastrophe worse than the Chernobyl disaster.

"We are sitting on a powder keg with a fuse that is burning, but we don't know how long that fuse is," said Alexander Nikitin, a former Russian navy officer and Bellona environmental activist who first revealed the existence of the dump at Andreeva Bay, on the Kola peninsula of north-western Russia.

The nightmare scenario, identified by Russia's Federal Nuclear Agency, raises new fears that Moscow is failing to properly manage the potentially deadly nuclear legacy of the Cold War, which has left the country with tonnes of plutonium and uranium and millions of tonnes of nuclear waste to deal with.


This is what happens when you let totalitarian leftists play with dangerous toys.