Putin

Visiting the Arctic in 2010 and helping attach a tracking device to a sedated polar bear, Vladimir Putin announced: “We are planning a serious spring cleaning of our Arctic territories.” That has remained largely an empty promise. In fact, rapid exploitation has been the order of the day, a project that includes what has to rank as one of the Worst Ideas in the World—the Russians are planning to supply their exploitation projects with floating nuclear power plants!

The prospect of these floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs) has elicited reactions that range from “floating Chernobyls” to “fairly proven hardware, derived from those used on the icebreakers.” Other observers, like former Soviet submarine captain and atomic safety inspector turned antinuclear campaigner Alexander Nikitin, worry about earthquakes and their aftereffects. “If a working floating nuclear reactor were dashed against the shore in a tsunami, it would mean an unavoidable nuclear accident.” For his troubles Nikitin has been arrested several times for treason and espionage, the first time coming in 1996, when Yeltsin was still president. Though never convicted—a good sign—he has spent considerable time in pretrial detention.

Luckily, the lightly enriched uranium the FNPPs will use will not make them an attractive target for criminals or terrorists.

The first FNPP, soon to be operational, is called the Academician Lomonosov; not coincidentally, the extended continental shelf that Russia claims as an extension of its mainland is also named after Mikhail Lomonosov, an eighteenth-century polymath of peasant origin. The floating reactors will be able to supply electricity, heat, and desalinated water to a city of 200,000. They will be refueled every three years and serviced every twelve, and have a lifespan of forty.

Fifteen countries from China to Argentina have already expressed interest in leasing FNPPs.

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The vast blank whiteness of the Arctic can, it seems, take any projection—from wealth rising from the sea like some god of ancient myth to tsunamis lashing floating nuclear power plants toward cities through waters black with spilled oil. Yet it’s also possible that both of these dramatic extremes will be avoided by the most common result of human endeavor—failure.

The gas and oil deposits may prove smaller than anticipated or more difficult and expensive to extract. The price of oil may stay low for a long time. And in the meanwhile breakthroughs in energy—fusion, superpowerful batteries—may make oil less necessary as fuel. The sea lanes over Russia connecting Asia and Europe may also not prove as lucrative as hoped. The dangerous unpredictability of the weather will impose strict limits on the shipping season, and many believe the main traffic will consist of raw materials being shipped out of the Russian Arctic rather than commercial traffic between Tokyo and Rotterdam. It wouldn’t take more than a few serious accidents for shippers, and insurers, to have second thoughts about the route. There have already been close calls. Two tankers, each loaded with thirteen thousand tons of diesel fuel, collided in July 2010, though the Russians dismissed the incident as a mere “fender bender.”

There are even pessimists when it comes to the possibility of a bounty of fish revealed by the shrinking ice cap. An Economist article, “Tequila Sunset,” warns that a “warming Arctic will not … be full of fish. It will simply be an ice-free version of the desert it already is.” The reason for this is that “global warming … may increase ocean stratification. This is the tendency of seawater to separate into layers, because fresh water is lighter than salt and cold water heavier than warm. The more stratified water is, the less nutrients in it move around.”

The greatest failure that could occur in the Arctic is, however, war. Henry “Hap” Arnold, commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces and the only U.S. officer ever to hold five-star rank in two military services (Army and Air Force), predicted the following: “If there is a Third World War the strategic center of it will be the North Pole.” Arnold was no doubt basing his thinking on the fact that the shortest distance between the United States and the USSR for strategic bombers was over the North Pole, and whoever controlled the Arctic would have a vital advantage. It wasn’t long before ICBMs made the North Pole less important, but that in turn made it all the more important for nuclear subs. Just as the United States was shocked by Sputnik in 1957, the Soviets were shocked by advanced U.S. nuclear subs like the Nautilus, which transited the Arctic Ocean in 1958, and the Skate, which surfaced at the North Pole in 1959.