Double trouble

It smacks of irresponsibility of the highest kind what Russia plan to do. It is prospecting for oil in the caving Arctic ice and doing it, using floating nuclear reactors! The United Industrial Corporation is planning to build a series of such floating stations to extract oil and gas offshore in some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. To go into operation by the end of 2012, the ship will accommodate two 35 MW reactors.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation dumped radioactive waste from more than 160 decommissioned nuclear submarines into the Arctic. In 1993, per Nuclear Power Daily 16 nuclear reactors and 10,000 containers of nuclear waste were dumped in the Kara and Barents sea.

During the Cold War, the Soviet arctic was a nuclear test zone with pollution from the Soviet military program leaving a “slow-motion Chernobyl” in excess of 3 billion curies of radioactivity. (By comparison, Chernobyl itself released only 100 million curies)

Will this be return to the Cold War times? Will dwindling energy be the driving force for the next big conflict on the planet? What will be the effect of drilling the Arctic for oil?