Sevmorput in breakdown off the coast of Africa
November 20, 2020 – Press release n°2
The arrival of the Russian nuclear-powered cargo ship was scheduled for early November at Progress station, in the north of the Antarctic continent.
For more than a month, the Sevmorput has been suffering a failure. She has been sailing at reduced speed to and from a small square in the South Atlantic Ocean off Angola and Congo Brazzaville.
According the social network Vkontakte spread by the Barents Observer, the breakdown of the only civilian nuclear-powered merchant ship still in operation does not affect the reactor compartment. The technical problems would come from the propeller shaft. Divers would be at work to carry out repairs, which could only be precarious.
An atomic merchant ship is zigzagging towards Antarctica
9:45 a.m.
Her arrival was scheduled for early November in a Russian logistic station along the Emperor and Adelie penguins’ territory. Even today, the Sevmorput is coming and going off Angola and Congo-Brazzaville. For several days, her erratic movements have been reported by the newspaper Barents Observer. The trajectory of the Sevmorput continues to be atypical. She could be confronted with technical problems or diplomatic polemics.
The Antarctic Treaty prohibits the dumping of nuclear waste. The last and only official use of nuclear power in Antarctica dates back to the 1960s and 1970s when a 1.8 megawatt nuclear power plant supplied electricity to the U.S. McMurdo science station.
Notices of oil spills on the world ocean
While the French Navy is sealing up cracks on the forepart of the Tanio wreck (1980) off Brittany, oil spills or oil spill risks are multiplying. The Covid-19 pandemic is involved in this resurgence. The crews are no longer relieved. Confined to their workplaces, they are overworked, cut off from the world and depressed. The Indian captain of the Wakashio, which ran aground on Mauritius, had been on board for a year and other crew members for 9 months. The minimal maintenance of merchant ships is also delayed. Political circumstances are other aggravating factors, as in the example of FSO (Floating Storage and Offloading) units which in peacetime “feed” tankers that have come empty from all over the world.
Nauseas
Trash ships
With one hand, the European Union bans them from its ports because they are dangers publics, with the other one it allows them to be in the trade over and over again in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Maghreb or faraway seas. Among the facilitators of this tragic double game for crews and damaging to the environment are 7 classification societies based in Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and the United Kingdom (1).
