Abandoned nuclear lighthouses of the Soviet empire
English Russia is hosting a fantastic gallery of abandoned Soviet nuclear lighthouses, which were strung in the polar regions off of Russia's northern coast. A rather Russian-Engrishy description, but you get the idea:
he 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 uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been 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 a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those 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 counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.
These are all ostensibly abandoned now, although some seafarers report the soft green gloaming of irradiated ghouls illuminating the granite outcrops of some of these isles at night.
Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses [English Russia]
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Ooh, shiny.
Or, well - not anymore. But still fascinating.
I've heard of these before, and it always seemed like a fundamentally sensible idea: If you're building a lighthouse on the far side of nowhere, you don't really want to have to refuel it too often. A small, self-contained nuclear power source can be made to be quite safe - though I know Russia has a problem these days with looters dismantling them to sell the raw metals, or they being left exposed to the elements.
And they're not actually reactors, they're thermal generators. (The difference is that they use the decay heat, not a chain reaction, as the power source.)
I'd love to see a Big Book (er, website) of Bizarre Soviet Experiments. Actually, I'd love to read a history of what exactly the Soviets were up to during the reign of the Union from 1922-1991. Sure, there's the obligatory chapter or three on slave labor camps. But there's also stuff like the Industrial Party trial, or that crazy plan to leave radioactive containers on farms to try to mutate the crops to produce higher yields. There'd probably need to be a chapter on their psychic research too.
Wasn't there a string of autonomous weather stations in the northern USSR that were powered the same way? I recall a film about the poor soldiers who had to decommission them after loggers or hunters found and opened them and began using the radiant heat to keep warm in winter and to cook soup.
A good number of Soviet experiments were simply an answer to the same in America -- hence they built 3 times as many nuclear submarines, won the first battle of the space race, etc.
Casting the net so wide also demands you include both sides of their participation in WWII, fights with the Vatican and other religious bodies, and at least an attempt to eliminate fatalities from poverty.
America on the other hand had a lot of fashion!