Posted on 01/16/2009 2:25:35 PM PST by BGHater
Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all this coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only polar night for 100 day a year.
But across this Northern coast there was always a short way for the cargo boats to travel from Eastern part of Russia to the Western. Now this trip can be made fairly easy with the appearance of all the satellite navigation equipment like GPS and others, but during the Soviet Era they had none of this.
So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn’t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.
Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.
Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs “RADIOACTIVITY” written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don’t stop the abandoned exotics lovers.
Wow. Amazing stuff. Great pics. A lady/girl did a web site about her trips into Chernoybyl area. She claimed to ride in their on her motorcycle. She actually took a tour but added the bike to make it more dramatic. The web site is still out there. It was amazing.
Very cool, and thanks for posting. Looting nuclear reactors is not my idea of long-term employment...
That is a cool lighthouse.
After studying both reports and in spite of my love of lighthouses, I’d prefer the Antarctic tour.
Looks like the “Pepsi Syndrome”.
No, but while you were in that line of work, I am sure all your performance evaluations would be glowing.
Very cool, and thanks for posting. Looting nuclear reactors is not my idea of long-term employment...
If you were in the gulag and they found it convenient to pick you for the duty, you could get long-term (well, at least lifetime, however short that might be) employment cleaning out nuclear reactors in submarines. Much easier, for the Soviet masters, than trying to do that job with robots . . .
BTTT
So they cranked up the reactors and left them unattended?
Old Ben is certainly no scientist ..... but that seems mighty careless to me!
Leave them unattended? That's how everyone thought back then.
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