Cleaning up the Soviet legacy

At first glance, Russia’s Kola bay — with its crystal-clear waters and soaring mountainous backdrop — is a location straight out of Vladimir Putin’s holiday snaps. But scratch beneath the surface, turn your gaze to the rusting hulks that line its shores, and the beauty quickly turns to horror. For this is the home of Atomflot, a nuclear icebreaker base now considered to be one of the environmental hotspots of the former Soviet Union.

At the heart of this nuclear dustbin sits the Lepse; a retired support vessel, streaked with rust, barely afloat, and crammed to the gunnels with around 650 largely damaged fuel rods from spent nuclear fuel assemblies. Thought to present the biggest radiation risk of all retired nuclear service ships in Russia, it has been described by experts as a floating Chernobyl.

Taken in isolation the Lepse is terrifying enough. But the vessel is a potent symbol of a wider, even more worrying problem: Russia’s Soviet-era heritage; a hastily developed, poorly designed, and now crumbling assemblage of reactors, ships and weapons that is regarded with increasing discomfort by Russia, its neighbours and the rest of the world. Fortunately the international community is awake to the threat. And despite its often fractious political relations with the west, Russia is the focus of almost unprecedented international collaboration, as a host of countries contribute money, expertise and equipment to the planet’s most challenging and dangerous clean-up operation.