Underwater nuclear waste in the Western Arctic

Scientists have calculated that there are five reactor compartments burried at the sea bottom in the western Arctic.
In addition, according to echosevera.ru, there are containers with spent nuclear fuel, 19 ships with solid radioactive waste, 755 structures and blocks of nuclear power plants contaminated with radioactive substances, not protected by hermetic packaging, and about 17 000 containers with such waste.
This information was confirmed by the head of the expedition to the area, Mikhail Flint, Deputy Director of the P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“There are hundreds of containers lying there: when you look at the picture shown by the side-scan locator, it’s just a scattering of containers,” he said talking about the results of the expedition.
The practice of dumping waste in the seas became widespread at the international level in the early 1950s with the active development of the nuclear fleet and the growing interest in the use of nuclear energy in general.
In the 1970s, the London Convention was adopted, which prohibited pollution of the sea, including radioactive waste, but the damage (not only by the Soviet Union, but also by the United States) was sufficient.

Alex Shishlo for Rough&Polished