K-19
 K-19 on the surface
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K-19 was a Soviet nuclear submarine of project 658 that the NATO was called "Hotel class". It was the Soviet Navy's submarine that, during its construction and later service, held the sad record of killing more seamen than any other in the fleet, alluding to an incident on July 4, 1961 received the unofficial nickname " Hiroshima ".
K-19 was the first nuclear powered submarine in the Soviet Navy to carry ballistic nuclear weapons . The three missiles had a range of 650 km and an explosive force of 1.4 megatons of TNT equivalent each .
The boats of Project 658 were of strategic importance for the USSR at the time, as they could carry nuclear weapons all the way to the American coast. ICBMs that could have reached these targets from a greater distance were not yet fully developed at that time .
Construction and test drives
K-19 was laid down on October 17, 1958 under hull number 901 from shipyard number 402 in Severodvinsk . While working on one of the ballast tanks, a fire broke out in which three shipyard workers were killed. The submarine was launched in mid-October 1959. The champagne bottle , which was supposed to shatter on one of the screws during the ceremony, slipped and remained intact because it was slowed down by the rubber coating on the body. The boat was then subjected to numerous tests.
During final tests in January 1960, operating errors caused damage to the reactor system. The pipes, valves and closures of the cooling system were exposed to a pressure of 40.4 MPa (400 atm ), which corresponded to an exceedance of the permissible pressure by 100%. One crew member and the engineer in charge were replaced after the final investigation and the commander responsible for the handover was demoted by one rank. The repair lasted until June 1960, when the reactor had to be opened and the fuel rods removed in order to reach the damaged parts. While the parts were being replaced, a repair team found beetles inside the reactor chamber, running around on the graphite lubricant of bolts that had been removed. The exact type - and thus information about their way of life - could not be determined, as the specialist institute did not reply to the request for copies to be sent.
After test drives totaling more than 1,000 nautical miles , a dive to the load limit of 300 meters at 280 meters resulted in leaks in the hatch above the reactor room, which expanded into a water ingress when the dive was continued, so that an emergency maneuver was initiated .
Captain 2nd rank (frigate captain / lieutenant colonel) Nikolai Vladimirovich Satejew was appointed commander of K-19 and took over the boat on November 12, 1960 from the shipyard commander. K-19 was assigned to the Northern Fleet on November 16, 1960 . In December 1960, a pump in the cooling water circuit was destroyed by damage to a ball bearing and the entire pump had to be replaced.
When the boat was loaded with rockets, there was another accident in 1961 in which a sailor was killed.
contamination
Course of events
In early July 1961, K-19 took part in the "Arctic Circle" exercise. Later it turned out that a small leak must have already formed here within the primary cooling water circuit of the second reactor. It had occurred within the circuit of a pressure sensor, so that the display of the pressure gauge no longer allowed any conclusions to be drawn about the actual condition of the cooling system.
During the exercise, on July 4, 1961, 70 nautical miles from the island of Jan Mayen , at 04:15 a.m. on board there was an accident at the reactor when the leak in the primary cooling circuit led to the cooling failure. The control rods were lowered and the reactor shut down. The cooling, which was still necessary to control the reactions in the switched-off reactor, could no longer be guaranteed because the pumps for circulating the coolant failed due to the pressure drop in the circuit.
The pressure in the cooling circuit was initially 200 atm and the temperature 300 ° C. As the pressure decreased, the temperature increased and the coolant began to boil. The pressure and temperature inside the reactor increased further, the fuel rods finally reached a temperature of 800 ° C and there was a risk of core meltdown . It was the first serious incident involving a nuclear reactor at sea in the Soviet Navy; the officers were not sure what would happen and, in the worst case, even feared a nuclear explosion .
No radio support could be requested from the Navy because the antenna for long-distance transmissions was defective and the remaining antenna only allowed transmissions over short distances.
The cooling circuits of the WM-70 reactors did not have any devices or connections to supply fresh cooling water to the primary cooling circuit from outside, so technicians had to enter the reactor room and temporarily install emergency cooling. In order to use the time it took to assemble the piping for this cooling system, the technicians wanted to temporarily cool the reactor with water from a plastic hose that they connected directly to the reserve cooling pump. The cold water from the hose met the hot water in the reactor and caused a spontaneous evaporation process in which hot steam and contaminated water were thrown into the reactor chamber. The tube was destroyed and the dose rate inside the chamber increased considerably.
After the pipeline was prepared, final assembly began, during which the technicians were exposed to high doses of ionizing radiation . Lieutenant Boris Korchilow and eight other sailors worked a total of two hours in the reactor room until they had welded the pipe for an emergency cooling system and the temperature in the reactor began to drop. Six of the men died of radiation sickness within a week , and two more after a fortnight.
Captain Sateev:
«Однако потерять несколько человек или погибнуть экипажу - вот каков был мой выбор. […] Система сработала, экипаж и лодка были спасены. Но какой ценой! […] Страшно было смотреть на ребят, они получили чудовищную дозу облучения. Лица изменились, не могли говорить, их рвало… »
“Losing some men - or the entire team - that was the choice I faced. [...] The system worked [again]. The crew and boat were saved. But at what price! [...] The boys looked terrible, had received a monstrous overdose of radiation. The faces changed, could no longer speak, threw up ... "
The leak continued to leak radioactive fission products and enter the ventilation system and the bilge water , contaminating the entire boat and exposing the crew to a high dose of radiation. The emergency calls from K-19 were eventually picked up by S-270 , a diesel-powered submarine of the Northern Fleet, which had also participated in the exercise. S-270 initially took over the seriously injured sailors from K-19: three men from the repair unit who had to be brought on board unable to move on stretchers, and eight others who could still walk.
In the event that NATO ships should attempt to take over K-19, S-270 had two torpedoes ready to fire in order to be able to sink K-19 quickly if necessary. Three days later, K-19 was towed to its home port after encountering surface vessels of the fleet.
Over the next ten years, another seventeen crew members died as a result of the contamination.
reception
Captain Satejew struck Lieutenant Korchilow posthumously for the title Hero of the Soviet Union before. But he and others were refused high-profile awards on the grounds that it would draw too much attention to the top-secret incident. The causes of death that were reported to the relatives of the deceased men did not contain any information about the radiation.
But even during the so-called thaw period in the Soviet Union, there was a critical examination of the incident in the theater, which the Kyrgyz author Mar Baidschijew after an autobiographical experience (Baidschiev himself was involved in repairing the nuclear accident of the wrecked submarine) in The play "Duel" was written down in 1966, first in Russian and then in Kyrgyz language. In 1969 the author Vasily Pavlovich Aksjonow created his own version of the piece, which in this version is one of the few known works of non-official literature in the Soviet Union.
In 2002, the film K-19 - Showdown in the Depth by Kathryn Bigelow , which refers to the events, was released.
Mikhail Gorbachev , former General Secretary of the Central Committee, suggested the crew of K-19 for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize , as they would have saved the world from a terrible environmental disaster on July 4, 1961 and prevented a possible nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the USA, as the latter would have prevented a nuclear explosion near their naval base on Jan Mayen could have been considered an attack.
Restoration
After the boat was towed in on July 7, 1961, it was initially moored near a base of the Northern Fleet. In August it was towed to a new anchorage, but then began to sag with the stern ever lower, as water escaping from the inside collected in the aft part of the ship. Again workers had to climb inside the contaminated interior and repair the damage.
In January 1962, K-19 was docked in Severodvinsk to be converted to Project 658M (NATO designation: Hotel II). First, the old reactor department was separated from the fuselage and replaced by a new one. The old compartment was sunk near the island of Novaya Zemlya in 1965 after the investigation was completed . The fuel rods are still in the two reactors today.
The boat was able to use the more modern R-21 missiles after the conversion . On October 15, 1962, the work was completed and K-19 was launched again.
On November 15, 1969, now under the command of Captain 1st Rank Shabanov, a collision occurred at 7:13 a.m. in the Barents Sea in a submerged state at a depth of about 60 meters without warning. The top of the K-19 hit the US submarine USS Gato (SSN-615) , was pushed down and began to sink uncontrollably. Just blowing out all the cells brought the boat back to the surface. The USS Gato, as it became known through an article in the New York Times only in 1975 , was on an espionage mission within Soviet territorial waters to scout out Soviet naval activities and bases. K-19 was able to return to base on its own, but had suffered damage to the forecastle .
On February 24, 1972, at a depth of 120 m, 1,300 kilometers north-east of Newfoundland , a fire broke out in the bilge of Division 9 when hydraulic oil dripped onto a hot filter from a leaky pipe. The fire spread to the neighboring department 8, as extinguishing efforts began too late due to incorrect reports. 28 seafarers died, twelve more were locked in division 10. After the immediate surfacing, the reactors were shut down immediately, but one of the auxiliary diesel generators was rendered inoperable by seawater, while the other did not start, so that K-19 drifted without a drive in heavy seas. In an immediately initiated rescue operation, more than 30 ships of the Soviet Navy ran out. The sailors were rescued by K-19 and the boat was towed in, but two crew members of rescue ships died in the storm. The twelve men in Division 10 were only released 24 days later after the boat reached a port.
In 1976 K-19 was rebuilt again. This time the boat was converted as a test carrier for future communication and sensor systems and the project name 658 was changed to 658C (German: 658S).
In August 1982, maintenance work on one of the batteries resulted in a short circuit and an arc discharge that fatally injured a sailor.
The End
K-19 was assigned to the reserve fleet on April 19, 1990 and the crew was reduced by more than half. In 1996 she was struck off the list of ships in the Navy and dragged into a bay, where she was to remain with other ships until the scrapping date.
In March 2002, a request from an American film team that wanted to use K-19 to shoot the film of the same name was rejected. The boat was towed to the Nerpa shipyard two months later , where it was visited one last time by former crew members. In 2003, the reactor compartment was cut out of the hull, sealed and anchored in Sajda Bay for temporary storage .
In 2008, plans were announced to preserve the boat's detached tower for a memorial to commemorate the victims among the first crew of K-19. The scrapping of the hull was completed in 2009.
See also
Evidence and references
Remarks
- ↑ is occasionally listed as a captain of the first rank, the times of the individual promotions are unclear.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d К-19 - достойная награда спустя 45 лет. In: lenta.ru. lenta.ru, accessed April 2, 2020 (Russian).
- ^ J. Apalkow: U-Boats of the Soviet Navy 1945–1991, part 1. p. 166.
- ↑ The operational history of the K-19 on deepstorm.ru, viewed on June 21, 2011
- ^ Reistad and Ølgaard: Inventory and Source Term Evaluation of Russian Nuclear Power Plants for Marine Applications. iaea.org, page 12 and following, viewed on June 20 (PDF file; 563 kB)
- ↑ The creation of the Soviet Union's nuclear submarine fleet. P. 163.
- ↑ Article Происшествие на советской подводной лодке "К-19" (Russian) on korabley.net, viewed on June 21, 2011
- ↑ quoted in The Creation of the Soviet Union's Nuclear Submarine Fleet. P. 183.
- ↑ Советская подводная лодка К-19 * Командир подлодки С-270 капитан 3 ранга Ж. Свербилов о трагедии К-19 1961 года. February 28, 2012, accessed April 2, 2020 .
- ↑ The creation of the Soviet Union's nuclear submarine fleet. P. 184.
- ↑ k19.ru, Documents with False Causes of Death, viewed June 20, 2011
- ↑ "The Poet Wassili Aksjonow" Master's thesis by Herbert Gantschacher for the acquisition of the academic title "Magister Artium" at the university, today University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Re / 1653/1988, July 1988
- ^ PL Ølgaard: Accidents in Nuclear Ships. iaea.org, page 13, viewed June 20 (PDF file; 1.07 MB)
- ^ Edward Offley: Scorpion down: sunk by the Soviets, buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion. Pp. 97, 98.
- ↑ quoted in The Creation of the Soviet Union's Nuclear Submarine Fleet. Pp. 360, 361.
- ↑ J. Apalkow: Подводные лодки советского флота 1945–1991, том I. P. 41.
literature
- Ю. В. Апальков: Подводные лодки советского флота 1945–1991, том I. (for example: J. Apalkow: U-Boats of the Soviet Navy 1945–1991, part 1. ) 2009, ISBN 978-5-903080-55-7 (Russian).
- Н. В. Усенко, П. Г. Котов, В. Г. Реданский, В. К. Куличков: Как создавался атомный подводный флот Советского Союза. (such as: Usenko, Kotov, Redanski, Kulichkow: The Creation of the Soviet Union's Nuclear Submarine Fleet). 2004, ISBN 5-89173-274-2 .
- Ole Reistad, Povl L. Ølgaard: Inventory and Source Term Evaluation of Russian Nuclear Power Plants for Marine Applications. April 2006, ISBN 87-7893-201-7 .
- Peter Huchthausen: K-19 and the history of the Russian nuclear submarines. National Geographic, 2002, ISBN 3-934385-88-5 .
- Pavel L. Podvig: Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces. The MIT Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-262-66181-2 .
- Edward Offley: Scorpion down: sunk by the Soviets, buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion. Basic Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-465-05185-4 .