Nuclear powered North Pole cruises

Why Russia?

There are only six nuclear icebreakers in the world and they all belong to Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear agency. It’s an organisation with a $300 billion portfolio, responsible for some 20 percent of Russia’s energy production. Rosatom have three more nuclear icebreakers in the works, and all will eventually eclipse Victory in size and power.

Russia’s polar dominance comes down to its interest in the North Sea Route, where shipping is growing apace as sea ice melts. The so-called Polar Silk Road above Russia is 30 percent quicker than going via the Suez Canal. Traffic increased 200 fold between 2010 and 2018, and reaching 30 million tonnes in 2019. It’s still got a bit of catching up to do. Suez Canal routes around 983 million tonnes.

Taking tourists to the North Pole was once useful employment for icebreakers in the summer months, when they would be sitting in Murmansk, unused. The huge increase in shipping in the NSR means that tourism is less of a priority.

Environmental impact

50 Years of Victory slices through the ice like a knife through butter. The video evidence is pretty awe inspiring – but what environmental impact does she have, opening the sea route like this? Ice reflects the sun’s rays, keeping the Arctic cool. Open sea has a lower reflectivity than sea ice, which would mean breaking ice is harmful. What’s more, polar bears tend to react to the presence of an icebreaker in their midst – and have been known to approach the vessel.

It’s a numbers game. There are so few North Pole journeys that these impacts are negligible. The tracks left by the icebreaker are utterly miniscule compared to the melting that naturally occurs every season.

Nuclear safety

Not everyone is happy with nuclear icebreakers like Victory, though they have been used to convey tourists to the pole since the early 1990s. In 1994, tourists were stopped at Tromso by Friends of the Earth Norway. The protestors cited Russia’s poor nuclear record, and argued that Western money should be spending money clearing nuclear waste, not contributing to it.

Despite early fears, there have been no nuclear incidents on North Pole cruises involving tourists. However, some people might be uneasy about traveling with Rosatom, who have a history of leaving incidents unreported. Between 1988 and 1994 there were four nuclear incidents on vessels. In 2011 icebreaker Taymyr started leaking cooling water whilst it was working off the coast of Siberia. In 2019 five scientists were killed in a nuclear accident at a military base – an incident Rosatom initially downplayed.

Russia’s first nuclear icebreaker, the Lenin, launched in 1957, but its nuclear plant is now sitting at the bottom of the sea, following two separate leaks in the 1960s. It’s not alone. There are an estimated 4,750 containers of nuclear waste sunk in Tvisokla Bay, at Novaya Zemlya – an archipelago that has long been used as a nuclear testing site, but now touted as a wildlife and wilderness area. Dumping was outlawed in the 1990s, and Russian ships have since had to scour the North Sea Route for nuclear risk before allowing more shipping.