Ah, the Soviet Union. It’s a strange place with strange ideas. Ideas like planting small unprotected nuclear power sources into hard-to-reach and inaccessible areas. I mean, nothing can go wrong as long as the government exists to maintain them, right?
Welcome to the world of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators or RTGs. It’s a piece of nuclear history that I’ve only recently learned about, and thought I should get your attention on this brand new horror as well. These things just revolve around the famously stable Russia, and it seems like it should be a cause for concern.
RTG is not a nuclear reactor, nor is it a “nuclear battery”. Instead, they work by converting heat from radioactive decay into electricity. However, due to the hazardous nature of the materials used, countries like the US only use RTG in applications such as space exploration. Traveling, Cassini, and New Horizons use RTG for power, just like the Mars probes Perseverance and Curiosity. However, these probes use expensive plutonium-238 as their power source, and we launch them far away from us.
Soviet Union though? Are not. It will instead use the super-radioactive, super-cheap Strontium-90, although later on, smaller RTGs have used the equally cheap Cesium-137 or Cerium-144. These three isotopes all have one thing in common; they are all products of spent nuclear fission. In other words, waste. Beta-M RTG on the ground is about 1.5 meters wide, 1.5 meters high and weighs about a ton, according to International Atomic Energy Agency. The entire unit has a capacity of about 1 to 1000 watts (which is quite extensive) and has an operating life of 10 to 20 years.
Originally built by the Soviet Navy to power lighthouses and radio-navigation beacons along Russia’s vast Arctic coast, the RTG powers civilization hundreds or even thousands of miles away. even thousands of miles, sometimes completely unprotected and always unattended. Sometimes they are fixed with metal frames or sheds, but sometimes these lighthouses and radio beacons are set up on hastily built wooden structures nearby with expensive RTGs. trapped outside to face the harsh elements of the Arctic. While the Soviet Union provided regular rotational patrols to maintain the RTG, that stopped at screech in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. After that, there was no money to maintain the hard-to-reach RTGs, and they fell victim to neglect and metal thieves.
After it proved useful to the Navy, the Soviet Union put the RTG into service in other rough terrain. So some ended up in the mountains of the former Soviet state of Georgia. Three residents from the village of Lia, Georgia, found a box high up in the mountains. Because this strange material gives off heat, the three used it to stay warm overnight, but when they woke up, they were vomiting and dizzy. A week later, a military hospital diagnosed all three with radiation sickness. Two of the men will make it through with the help of dozens of skin grafts and months in the hospital. But the man who slept closest to the source of the radioactive isotope and handled it the most could not be saved.
Their arrival at the hospital sparked a frenzied scramble from the international atomic community to find the orphan source of radiation. Footage of the cleanup team both training to recover and actually trapping the Strontium-90 core shows how dangerous RTGs are:
However, that’s not the only RTG-related issue. In 2001, vandals broke into a lighthouse on Kandalashka Bay and stole three radioactive isotope sources (all three were recovered and sent to Moscow). Three men in the mountains of Georgia were also revealed in 2002 after accidentally finding cores left in the woods. In 2003, the dismantlers threw a core into the Baltic Sea, where a team of experts recovered it.
There are still hundreds of RTGs deployed along Russia’s Arctic coast today International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States and the EU have worked with Russia to clean up these orphaned nuclear sources, and more than 1,000 sources have been recovered by officials for disposal at the largest nuclear processing plant in the Russian Federation “FSUE PA.” Mayak. However, the program fell apart in 2014 following Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the outbreak of the G8. Russia subsequently refused international help in cleaning up the RTG. Although other countries try to cooperate with Russia to clean up the RTG (especially Norway is interested in clean up northeastern Russia) and some progress has been made in 2019 towards enabling international help.
