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Nuke warheads on sunken Russian sub reportedly leaked
Monday, Nov. 25, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

In a copyright story, the newspaper said that as the sub sank, the nuclear warheads, containing perhaps 200 pounds of radioactive plutonium-239, broke open and dumped the lethal element into the sea. Later, Russian investigators discovered traces of plutonium on floating submarine debris.

And, said the Examiner, despite Soviet and U.S. assurances there was no contamination, it was the first case in which weapons-grade plutonium leaked from a submarine into the ocean.

"The possibility of a nuclear explosion and radioactive contamination of the environment is ruled out," the Soviet news agency Tass said at the time, citing unnamed "specialists."

Pentagon officials said they had detected no radioactive leaks in air or water samples from the site.

Scientists say they have no idea how far, or if, the plutonium traveled from the submarine, which ended up 18,000 feet down. The submarine was one of three Soviet, and two U.S., nuclear-armed subs to sink during the Cold War.

Because of the depth, experts said the plutonium might tend to stay put because of slow water circulation and sticky seafloor mud.

But some might have been absorbed by food chain creatures in the upper layers of the ocean as the sub sank. If so, those particles of plutonium may still be in some fish. Plutonium is lethal in extremely small quantities and remains radioactive for thousands of years.

"We are aware of the fact that the warheads are destroyed, but how far the plutonium has gone, it's not known," said Stanislav Vesnovskii, a top scientist at Arzamas-16, one of Russia's two main nuclear weapons laboratories, in an interview with the Examiner through an interpreter.

Vesnovskii, his Russian colleagues and American scientists are hoping to launch a U.S.-Russian collaboration to send an oceanographic ship to survey the sunken sub, K-219, with deep-sea cameras and to gather seafloor samples. They also could assess whether the spill should be cleaned up.

A cleanup would be "a very difficult and tremendously expensive affair," Mikhail D. Ageev of the Institute of Marine Technology Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, told the newspaper.

U.S. scientists include Charles Hollister and Hugh Livingston, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The Russians have privately asked researchers at the University of California-run Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons labs to join the project.

"There's every reason to believe plutonium is in the marine environment, which is a first," said Hollister, a noted physical oceanographer who is also vice president of Woods Hole. "We just need to get a handshake and some support for a joint Russian-American expedition."

Hollister said the expedition could help test his theory that nuclear waste could safely be buried under the ocean floor.

The expedition also could test ways to clean up radioactive spills at sea.

The plutonium fragments could be recovered by sucking up seafloor sediment with what Hollister calls a "hummingbird-type sucker system."

"It's like a teeny tiny little vacuum cleaner," he said. "We'd really have to be careful when we brought (plutonium) up on the ship. You just don't play around with plutonium."

Experts say the deep, cold ocean water at the site circulates slowly, so the plutonium probably wouldn't disperse quickly.

Even if it did, it might dilute quickly.

"It's a big ocean," observed former Clinton White House advisor Frank Von Hippel, a Princeton professor and one of the nation's top experts on plutonium and nuclear weapons control.

 

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