Abandoned Nuclear Lighthouses

The Northern Soviet waters were equipped with a string of lighthouses to mark the treacherous passages through the dark times of the years.  To make these remote beacons autonomous, they were powered by small nuclear reactors.  EnglishRussia has the fascinating story of how that all turned out, along with some pretty cool photos.

Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.

Link - via darkroastedblend


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Thankfully, they have all been removed, decontaminated and replaced with Solar installations by the Russians and the Norwegians.

http://www.barentsobserver.com/russia-removed-radioactive-lighthouses-from-arctic-coast.4525112-16149.html

Earlier stories especially from the russianenglish
website showed these as being abandoned and
forgotten. I'm glad they didn't forget and fixed
the problem
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No, the scary thing is that during various political upheavals, maps have been mislaid and now some of the locations are lost.

Not that I'm saying you should be worried about any dangers, be they windblown or of terrorist origin. If you were a terrorist, would you journey halfway around the world into the coldest inhabited country in the world, just to look for old RTG lighthouses that have been misplaced, just so you could put the strontium in a dirty bomb?
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So does that mean that all the looters probably died from trying to break in and steal stuff from the lighthouses? Cool, In the old days they would probably have called that place cursed.
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