Russia Base Faces Radiation Disaster : Environment: Fuel dump at Arctic nuclear submarine post poses larger threat than Chernobyl, activists warn.

Russia’s largest submarine base holds thousands of spent nuclear fuel tanks in storage facilities so unsafe that the risk of radioactive pollution far exceeds that of Chernobyl, according to a Norwegian environmental group.

The report by the Bellona Foundation was distributed here this week despite harassment of its authors by a successor agency to the Soviet KGB.

The report called for action to prevent nuclear disaster at the Zapadnaya Litsa base, located on a fiord above the Arctic Circle, 28 miles from the Russia-Norway border.

Military bases across the former Soviet Union have been notorious for years as sources of nuclear contamination, but Bellona’s study was an unusually detailed expose of a major offender--the navy base’s waste storage facility at Andreyev Bay.

Years in the works, the study revealed that the navy’s Northern Fleet has since the early 1960s kept metal containers full of radioactive waste in an open field near the bay, where they are covered much of the year by snow and ice. At least 32 containers, with a total of 200 to 220 fuel tanks, are outdoors now, the study said.

It also reported that the main Andreyev Bay waste facility--three concrete tanks built after a 1982 radiation leak had shut down the previous waste facility--is composed of “makeshift structures” designed for no more than four years of safe use.

And the study disclosed that the former waste facility, though emptied of fuel tanks more than a decade ago, remains standing and is emitting low-level radiation through a layer of concrete that was supposed to stop it.

In all, more than 21,000 cylindrical fuel tanks--enough to power 90 nuclear submarine reactors--are in perilous storage at the base, susceptible to radiation leakage into the air and underground water or overheating and explosion, the report concluded.

“The amount of radiation [at the base] is several hundred times more than it was inside the reactor of Chernobyl,” which exploded in April, 1986, in the Soviet Union’s worst environmental disaster, said Thomas Nilsen, a co-author of the study.

“I would be very surprised if some of this radiation isn’t finding its way into the Barents Sea,” said Frederic Hauge, Bellona’s director.

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Bellona has been working on the Kola Peninsula since 1989 to document hazards to marine life in the Barents, on which Norway and Russia share a coastline. The Norwegian government finances the group and has set aside $20 million to help Russia clean up the environment.

In October, shortly after Bellona circulated a draft of its report to Russian government agencies to solicit pre-publication comment, the Federal Security Service raided the group’s Russian offices in Murmansk, seizing computers, diskettes and video cameras. The security service also began interrogating employees and collaborators and searching private apartments.

The security service said its investigation--which has produced no criminal charges but which the service said is continuing--is aimed at Russians who handed unspecified classified military secrets to the group.

Environmentalists say the crackdown is part of a spreading cloak of secrecy around Russian nuclear facilities that could shut off U.S. and European aid to help Moscow clean them up.

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Russia’s own nuclear regulatory commission lost its right to inspect military bases over the summer. And U.S. officials have reported trouble making safety inspections of civilian nuclear plants as called for under U.S.-Russian cooperation agreements.

Releasing its report here Wednesday, Bellona’s leaders denied that they are involved in espionage and vowed to continue their work.

Waving a sheaf of black-and-white photos above his head, Igor Kudrik, the head of Bellona’s Russian branch, told reporters: “This is the only storage facility of the Northern Fleet. You see that it is in terrible shape. For some reason, information about it is considered classified.”

Alexander Mikhailov, the security service’s chief spokesman, made a surprise appearance at the news conference to defend its police investigation. He criticized Kudrik for distributing the photos.

“Such information, widely distributed by ecologists, can, for example, provoke terrorists to use the data for staging provocations and nuclear blackmail,” Mikhailov said.

The navy offered a non-confrontational response on Thursday, saying it was aware of Bellona’s report and calling the waste problem at the submarine base “very complex.”