Scrapyard of Russian subs to be cleared up

[emad]

Following news that the US Navy is sending its defunct fleet of ageing, toxin-ridden ships to a British yard for decontamination and scrap, the UK's Telegraph reports today that the Russians are rattling the begging bowl to clean up their own act:

<snip>:

Germany pledged £220 million yesterday to help Russia to dismantle 120 rusting atomic submarines in one of the world's largest nuclear dumping grounds. The six-year deal is aimed at cleaning up the Kola Peninsula in Russia's far north-west, where a vast amount of Soviet-era naval hardware lies abandoned, much of it leaking radioactivity into the rich fishing grounds of the Barents Sea.

Russian and German ministers signed the pact on the sidelines of a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Yekaterinburg. The money will help to build a temporary storage site for reactors from old submarines under a 2002 agreement by the Group of Eight industrialised nations to prevent the spread of material that could be used to create weapons of mass destruction.

Military and scientific facilities across the former Soviet Union are a key target for the programme, which allocated £12 billion over 20 years to cleaning up the often-dilapidated sites and improving their security. Plans to clean up the Kola Peninsula stalled after the G8 agreement until Moscow agreed in January to waive taxation on specialist equipment shipped to Russia by partner states.

<snip>

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/10/wkola10.xml&sSheet=/portal/2003/10/10/ixportal.html

[ReadTomPaine]

1. Wonder what happens to the discarded nuke material they have aboard.

What's the final storage destination.