Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses

The Russian Northern coast is a vast territory that runs for a few thousand miles and all the coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean that there is no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. So essentially there is only polar night for 100 days of the year.

This Northern coast, has always been used by cargo boats as a short cut to travel from the Eastern part of Russia to the Western part. Now this trip can be made fairly easy with the appearance of all the satellite navigation equipment like GPS and others that is readily available today, however during the Soviet Era none of this was available.

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 the uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So a series of lighthouses was 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 years without service or any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up these structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed in the lighthouses to power them. These 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 calculated the time of year and the length of daylight, from which it automatically turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to nearby ships to warn them on their journey. It all looked and ran like something from a sci-fi book and they most probably were for their time.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did the job but after some time they collapsed. Mostly as a result of the hunt for metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by 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.

 

Now these derelict lighthouses stand abandoned across the great northern coast of Russia causing great pollution to our environment, sad that man in all its infinite wisdom and cleverness can create such technology but in the same instance cause such great harm...

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