Gagiyevo, The first batch of confidential administrative regions that were decrypted after the collapse of of the Soviet Union. Before 1999, the city had no name. Whether it was express delivery or letter writing, it was called "Morman-130".
" People at that time did not expect that this military city located in Arctic Circle would become a storage area for nuclear waste after decryption." The guide of Murmansk pointed to the two coordinates on the map and said: "This is North Morsk, where the headquarters of the Northern Fleet is located, is located. 30 kilometers along the northwest coastline of Kora Bay, and is Gagiyevo."
Before the large-scale expansion of the Northern Fleet Naval Base, Gagiyevo was one of the three major supply ports of the Russian Northern Fleet, about 80 kilometers from the capital of Murmansk and less than 100 kilometers from the nearest Norwegian border.
So, when Norway learned that the Soviet Union would be decommissioned at one time When the ten nuclear submarines were , they immediately sent people to discuss with the senior management of the Northern Fleet: Can the nuclear waste dismantled from the nuclear submarine be properly disposed of and do not sink directly into the Kola Bay.
Andrev Bay nuclear waste restricted area
2020 nuclear radiation investigation report by the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission shows that Norway has assisted Russia in disposing of nuclear waste in the Arctic through funding for 25 consecutive years. The three nuclear waste storage sites have been disclosed. In , Seda Bay, Andref Bay and Gremiha Bay in , the liquid storage volume alone exceeds 10,000 cubic meters, making it the world's largest nuclear waste storage area.
Thankfully, the radioactive activity of Seda Bay has decreased to 20,000 Ci (restricted visits are available), and the activity of nuclear waste in Andref Bay has decreased by about one-third (approximately prohibited), and Gremiha Bay has stored 11 nuclear submarine liquid metal cooling reactors, and there are still 4 of them that have not been dismantled yet, so they have not been opened to the public (forbidden to access).
Nepa Port
There are two ports and two inspections from Polyanel to Gagijevo. The larger Oronya Port is still a military restricted area. Another nipa port has been acquired by Russian companies to dismantle civilian cargo ships. It was closed for nuclear radiation detection to this day. Unexpectedly, this nipa port is actually located in Andref Bay.
The guide saw that I was very interested and parked and told an unknown secret: in 1982 On February 5, the staff of Andrefu Port discovered the nuclear leak but did not report it. They tried to use 20 bags of flour to block the cracks, which were temporarily blocked under the action of low temperature. After more than ten days, they found that the cracks were getting bigger and bigger, so that the average daily leakage soared from 30 liters to 30 tons at the end of September. Finally, 3,000 chemical defense teams were dispatched to use 7,000 tons of cement to completely cover the leaked pool.
The leak occurred in Building 5 of the Naval Base, which specializes in storing fuel components of nuclear submarines. The cause of the crack was the pool metal coating . The quality failed to meet the standards and the operation errors. The left pool in the two pools had cracks due to long-term full load operation. A year after the incident, the right pool fuel rod had been removed and the wastewater was emptied. The left pool was injected with 600 cubic meters of concrete due to early error operation, resulting in the 25 fuel rods not being taken out so far.
989, Building 5 was completely closed and prohibited from approaching, and the Gajiyewo we went to was only 5 kilometers away from this building. What's more terrifying is that , the seabed 1.7 kilometers away from the northeast corner of Nepa Port is the Andref Bay submarine storage warehouse that stores 21,000 abandoned nuclear fuel rods .
According to the information published in the Soviet era, the submarine storage warehouse uses double-layer protection of special concrete and steel, which can resist magnitude 8 earthquakes and 30,000 equivalents (equivalent to two Hiroshima atomic bombs). However, the latest investigation found that cracks have appeared on the walls of the submarine storage warehouse, and seawater seepage is not ruled out. In addition, the signs of Nepa Port being closed due to radiation detection, etc., are extremely likely to occur.
originally planned to visit Gageyevo and return to Normoirsk for the night that night, but unexpectedly, there was a super heavy blizzard as soon as I arrived in Gageyevo city. It was snowing 20 cm thick in less than an hour, so I had to find a hotel nearby to check in.
It must be noted that if you want to spend the night in Gagiyevo, you must first go to the police station to report before the hotel can agree to check in. If the police station gets off work (after 17 o'clock) or the hotel is full, you can only wait for the snow shovel to clear the snow before returning to the city overnight.
While the lights were still bright, we simply walked around the city. The local friend we found by the guide explained: Gagiyevo was established in 1957. It was originally a high-level naval sanitation area of the Northern Fleet of the Soviet Union. In 1967, it was changed to a logistics base and storage area, mainly storing food and medical supplies from the Northern Fleet, etc.
After the nuclear leak in the port of Andrefu, Gagiyevo was banned from his administrative title and official title, and was named "Morman-130". It was not until the nuclear leak was "properly handled" in 1999 that it was restored to its original name and opened to the public.
Although most of the facilities of the Navy Logistics Base have been moved to Murmansk, there are still several military workshops left in Gagiyevo, so several warships will be stopped from time to time outside the port.
You can see several warships in the distance on the back hillside, which seems to be under maintenance. The entire city is mainly based on the terrain of the circular bay, with a population of about 12,000. A small number of residents make their living by fishing and reindeer. Most of them are the families of soldiers serving in the Northern Fleet, including many families who have lived with the army for 20 years (the guide's friend is).
When I was sleeping soundly at night, I was woken up by the guide. It turned out that an aurora appeared after the snow, and it was a very rare moving aurora, just like a cloud drifting little by little with time.
Guide patiently gave me a 20-minute popular science. Simply put, it is: the formation of Northern Lights comes from the role of magnetic field and solar electrical particle flow, and the earth has two magnetic poles in the north and south. The magnetic field formed is not fixed. When the magnetic field is unstable or external factors interfere, the moving northern lights will appear. As for where to see the aurora, when to see the aurora, how obvious and dense the aurora can be seen, we can only rely on observing the solar particle flow to predict, and the accuracy is very low.
Generally speaking, the aurora lasts only a few minutes, and there are rarely continuous aurora more than 20 minutes. The aurora we saw that night was divided into four times, each time at least 10 minutes, and at most once lasted for 25 minutes, which also gave us plenty of time to shoot.
Note: Long exposure is required for shooting mobile aurora (short exposure is suitable for fixed small scenes), and it is difficult to meet the perfect focal length. You must predict the direction of the light to capture the panoramic view.
Google Map
Inside the stacking yard
I rushed to the Saida Bay nuclear waste stacking yard early the next morning. As a result, I realized that it was prohibited to carry shooting equipment when I arrived at the place. I could only find a panoramic view from Google map, and then found an internal picture from the official website of the Northern Fleet for everyone to understand.
Saida Bay yard was built in 1990. It has 120 super-large cylinders. The red cylinder can hold 200 cubic meters of solid radioactive waste and the gray can hold 150 cubic meters of liquid radioactive waste. These wastes mainly come from the submarine storage library. The total investment is about 5 million euros , and it has been fully filled. And this is just the smallest of the three stacking yards.
Why does there be so much nuclear waste? The
guide did some calculations for me. Russia has retired 120 nuclear submarines of the Northern Fleet and 75 submarines of the Pacific Fleet . All of these retired nuclear submarines were dismantled and processed in Murmansk.
However, in 2002, the " G8 " including Russia, Britain, the United States, Germany and France signed a "nuclear control plan" that cost more than US$20 billion. The United States transferred "nuclear facility processing technology" for free to help Russia improve the unloading, dismantling, storage and other technologies of nuclear facilities. After selecting the reactor land-based storage point, the United States took the lead in designing it.
Why do European and American countries pay for technology to help Russia? Because Russia struggled after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was indeed a precedent for dumping nuclear waste and waste nuclear facilities in the Norwegian Sea and Barents Sea. Including , the Kara Sea and in the north of Siberia. In order to avoid Russia's penetration from affecting Europe and the entire world, we jointly formed the "Group of Eight" to help Russia.
However, when Russia dismantled nuclear submarines and stored nuclear waste, it was found that the United States was just giving Russia the outdated backward technology, which also made it impossible to properly handle 17,000 radioactive waste containers, 16 abandoned nuclear reactors, and 5 retired nuclear submarines (one of which two reactors are still in operation).
(Next stop Beimoersk, the city where the Russian Northern Fleet is headquartered)
