Comment: The following article was posted on the BBC on 24 Jan 2013. The sub involved with the single Project 645 unit, the propulsion system prototype for the lead-bismuth-eutectic liquid-metal plant used by all ALFA Class hulls.
Eyewitness: Tragedy of Soviet nuclear submarine K-27 By Yaroslava Kiryukhina BBC Russian reporter
The Russian authorities are investigating whether a sunken Soviet nuclear-powered submarine, the K-27, can be safely raised so that the uranium in its reactors may be removed.
At the height of the Cold War, in 1968, the K-27 met with disaster when radiation escaped from one of its reactors during a voyage in the Arctic.
Vyacheslav Mazurenko, then 22, was serving as a chief warrant officer (CWO) on the vessel, which now lies abandoned in the Arctic's Kara Sea. Today he lives in Ukraine and he told BBC Russian what happened.
"We were on a five-day trip to check everything was working normally, before a 70-day round-the-world mission without resurfacing," he said.
"It was the end of the third day and everything seemed to be going well. The crew was really tired."
The mission would be to collect data about Nato and other enemy bases. K-27 had two experimental liquid metal-cooled reactors - a design never tried before in the Soviet navy. Nuclear power enabled the sub to stay underwater for weeks without resurfacing and without having to refuel.
"At 11:35 everything was peaceful," he said.
"The bulkheads were open. I was in the fifth compartment, next to the fourth compartment with the two nuclear reactors, talking to some crew members there. We suddenly noticed some people running.
"We had a radiation detector in the compartment, but it was switched off. To be honest, we hadn't paid much attention to the radiation dosimeters we were given. But then, our radiation supervisor switched on the detector in the compartment and it went off the scale. He looked surprised and worried."
They did not understand what had happened immediately because the radioactive gas had no odour or colour. But two hours later, some crewmen came out of the fourth compartment - and some of them had to be carried, because they could not walk, CWO Mazurenko said.
He put it down to fatigue, because the crew had spent three days with almost no sleep.
The submarine headed back to its base on the Kola Peninsula, by the Barents Sea, which took five hours.
As the sub approached, the base's command fled the dockside, because special radiation alarms onshore were emitting a deafening roar, CWO Mazurenko recalled.
Soon after, the base commander picked up the captain in a car, but most of the crew had to walk 2km (1.2 miles) back to their barracks under their own steam.
Several specialist crew members were left on board the toxic sub for about a day, because they were under orders to keep watch.
Some have blamed K-27's Capt Pavel Leonov over the accident, but CWO Mazurenko says the captain faced a life-or-death choice.
"When the sub surfaced to make the trip back to the docks, the division ordered it to cut its engines and await special instructions. The captain, however, decided to keep going, because if the sub stopped for several hours nobody would survive long enough to get it back to base."
The crew of 144 were poisoned - nine died of radiation sickness soon after the emergency, and the others were ill for years before their premature deaths.
K-27 went into service in 1963, about five years after construction had started. It was very expensive and took longer to build than other Soviet nuclear submarines. So the sailors called it the "Little Golden Fish" - or "Zolotaya Rybka" in Russian - after a magical, fairy-tale fish which makes people's wishes come true.
"In Soviet times, we were told that our subs were the best, and we had to be different from the 'imperialists'. But the first subs were far from perfect. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said: 'We'll catch up with you and overtake you'. They kept churning out new subs, regardless of the risk to people," CWO Mazurenko said.
The crew were part of the military elite. They got lemons and oranges - citrus fruit that most Soviet citizens, battling daily with shortages, never saw.
The crew were told that their reactors were extremely safe and could not suffer the breakdowns that had plagued some other Russian submarines in the past, CWO Mazurenko said.
"When the assessment commission came round, its members were often afraid to visit the reactor compartment. They always tried to avoid it, but Captain Leonov actually sat on one of the reactors, to show them how safe it was."
However, CWO Mazurenko says radioactive particles had been detected aboard the submarine from the very start.
He was among 10 lucky crew members to be sent to a Leningrad hospital within a day of the disaster. The fate of the rest of the crew was in the hands of the Communist Party in Moscow.
Five days after the accident, the rest were taken to Leningrad - now called St Petersburg. They were each isolated from the outside world.
Many Soviet sailors and officers were ordered to donate blood and bone marrow, knowing nothing about the accident, which remained an official secret for three decades.
K-27 officers were later warned they should not have children for five years and were given regular check-ups, but there was no proper medical follow-up for the ordinary submariners, according to CWO Mazurenko. Many of them were declared "healthy" by military doctors, despite their illnesses, he added.
On the medical certificate they received 25 years after the disaster, it simply read: "Participated in nuclear accident elimination on the submarine. Exposed to radiation."
Despite what happened, Vyacheslav Mazurenko told the BBC: "I do not regret that I served almost four years on this submarine, with these people."
Of the original 144 crew, only 56 are still alive. Most of them became physically handicapped and they still do not know the level of radiation they were exposed to.
In 1981, K-27 was sunk at a depth of just 30m (99ft) in the Kara Sea - far shallower than the depth required by international guidelines.
Sunk in 1981? I remember studying about that boat for most of my career. TOM
Tom Duffy:
You point out a major problem that has existed within the Navy for years: the failure to disseminate information to those activities legitimately in need of such information. As previously discussed, the compartmentalization of the K-129 acoustic data was a prime example of that policy: what the Navy could have known in 1968 they learned
41 years too late.
Back to the lead-bismuth-eutectic NOVEMBER which experienced that catastrophic radiation accident while on a
shake-down cruise just prior to a round-the-world submerged deployment, can you imagine the problem had that accident occurred during the deployment such as deep in the South Pacific (60S) after transiting the Drake Passage ?
The part about the on-shore radiation alarms going off as the submarine was approaching the pier is just appalling.
Bruce Rule
Tom Duffy's posting on Project 645, the lead-bismuth-eutectic (LBE) NOVEMBER (K-27), has triggered a series of odd thoughts; thank you Tom.
First: Since NOVEMBERs had no independent from the power-train source of electrical power – no SSTGs – and were electrically “starved” for the dc power, which was their primary system, operating an LBE plant would have been a neat trick. This is because circulating such very high density liquid-metal slurry in the primary loop of a nuclear reactor takes – if I remember correctly – about 20 percent of the power produced by the reactor. The only way to provide such power would have been to use steam turbines to drive those circulating pumps which would have made that NOVEMBER “look” very different. The other problem with an LBE plant is that the coolant has a eutectic point (lowest temperature at which it “freezes” - consolidate is perhaps a better word) of about 255 degrees F; hence, you have to keep the reactor running to avoid the LB from going solid or you have to have an external heat source (steam from ashore).
In the every day world, ethylene glycol is added to the water in your car's radiator to lower the eutectic point and prevent freezing. Pure ethylene glycol freezes at 10F but when mixed to the 70-percent level with water, the freezing point is lowered to minus 60F, the eutectic point. More of less ethylene glycol raises the eutectic point.
Second (see the Wikipedia article below): the LBE NOVEMBER (K-27) suffered a final indignity: it had to be rammed by a surface ship to insure it sank in the Kara Sea off the east coast of Novaya Zemlya (72°31'N 55°30'E) on 6 Sep 1982. I used Google Earth to search near that position to see if the wreck was visible in the reported shallow water. Off the coast of Andoya in North Norway, you could clearly see the bottom in 40-60 feet of water on a calm day. I had no luck with Google; perhaps others should try.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
K-27 was the only submarine of Projekt 645 in the Soviet Navy. Projekt 645 did not have its own NATO reporting name; it was a test attack submarine, incorporating a pair of experimental VT-1 reactor plants using liquid-metal coolant (lead-bismuth alloy) into a modified hull of a November class submarine (Project 627A).
The keel of K-27 was laid down on 15 June 1958 at SeverodvinskShipyard No. 402. She was launched on 1 April 1962 and went into service as test attack submarine on 30 October 1963. K-27 was officially commissioned into the Red Banner Northern Fleet on 7 September 1965 (the submarine was included into 17th submarine division, based on Gremikha).
The VT-1 reactors were troublesome from the first criticality, but the K-27 was able to continue operations for five years. On 24 May 1968, however, one reactor's power output suddenly dropped sharply, radioactive gases were released into the reactor compartment, and radiation levels throughout the boat increased dangerously - by 1.5 Gy/h (mostly gamma and neutron, with some alpha and beta from the gasses), in the reactor compartment. The crew's training was inadequate; they did not recognize that their reactor had suffered extensive fuel element failures. By the time they abandoned their attempts to repair the reactor at sea, nine crewmen had been fatally exposed.
About one-fifth of the core had experienced inadequate cooling caused by uneven coolant flow. The hotspots had ruptured, releasing nuclear fuel and fission products into the liquid metal coolant, which circulated them throughout the reactor compartment.
K-27 lied up in Gremikha Bay since 20 June 1968 with cooling reactors and different experimental works were made aboard till 1973 (including successful starting of starboard reactor up to 40% of maximal power, plans to cut off the reactor compartment and to replace it with a new one equipped with standard VM-A water-cooled reactors, etc.). But rebuilding or replacement of the port-side reactor was considered too expensive and inappropriate procedure as more modern nuclear-powered submarines entered service already. The submarine was decommissioned on 1 February 1979 and her reactor compartment was filled with special solidifying mixture offurfurol and bitumen in summer 1981 to avoid sea nuclear pollution (the work was performed bySeverodvinsk shipyard No. 893 "Zvezdochka").] K-27 was towed to a special training area in the Kara Sea and scuttled there on 6 September 1982 in the point 72°31'N 55°30'E (north-east coast of Novaya Zemlya, Stepovoy Bay) at a depth 33 m only, the naval rescue tug rammed the stern of submarine to achieve its right submergence because K-27's nose touched the sea bottom whereas the stern was afloat. That operation was performed in contempt of IAEA requirement which asked to scuttle the submarine somewhere at a depth not less than 3,000-4,000 m. The last scientific expedition of the Russian Ministry of Emergencies in the Kara Sea examined the K-27 site in September 2006, samples of water, bottom and fauna were taken and analyzed; it was reported that radiation environment was stable.
Any lessons learned from Projekt 645 were applied in Projekt 705 and 705K - the Alfa class submarines, which were equipped with similar liquid-metal-cooled reactors.