Russian Nuke Whistleblower Acquitted

The court, presided over by Judge Sergey Golets, acquitted Nikitin Dec. 29 of all charges connected with information he published on nuclear accidents of Russia's Northern Fleet of submarines. It is not yet clear whether the prosecution will appeal.

Nikitin was arrested and charged with espionage by the Russian Security Police, the FSB, the successor to the infamous Soviet-era KGB, for his participation in the 1995 report "The Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive Contamination," published by the Norwegian environmental watchdog Bellona.

Nikitin has maintained throughout the more than four years of the investigation and through all three of his trials that all information he contributed to the report was publicly available.

Nikitin maintained that the need for information about the dangerous storage practices of nuclear waste in the Russian navy was important for the world community to know, and under the Russian Constitution, such information could under no circumstances be classified as secret.

The Russian Northern Fleet operates 42 nuclear submarines and three nuclear powered battle cruisers from five naval bases on the Kola Peninsula and one in Arkhangelsk County. In addition, there are about 100 inactive nuclear powered submarines laid up at different bases.

In his final speech to the court Dec. 29, Nikitin focused on submarine accidents and secrecy that prevents the younger generations from learning lessons from past mistakes. "The thought behind it is that the dead should teach the living," said Nikitin.

Addressing that part of the accusation that deals with divulging of information on third generation nuclear reactors aboard Russian submarines, Nikitin said the prosecution's damage evaluation was a fraud. FSB witnesses told the court that the damage from the information Nikitin disclosed would bring $20,000 of losses to the country, should the institute that designed them sell them abroad.

"Such a deal is a fraud," Nikitin said. "The reactors of this generation were designed back in the '70s and are not in use any longer."

The courtroom was crowded with journalists, TV-crews and observers. Nikitin's speech was followed by applause.

Nikitin became one of the world's most prominent environmental activists. Among other honours, in 1997 he received the $75,000 Goldman Prize, often called the Nobel Prize for the environment.

His case has attracted support from the European Union which sent observers to several court proceedings, and from Vice President Al Gore who discussed the matter during a 1998 trip to Moscow with then Russian Prime Minister Sergey Kirienko.

Speaking via videotape to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in January 1999 after receiving the AAAS' Science and Human Rights award, Nikitin explained the reason behind his work on the Bellona report. "The world is in need of a complex plan of environmental salvation, where the actions, common for all countries, would conceit with the local, national actions. Nobody will survive alone," he said.

"That was our view of environmental problems when we in Bellona started to work on the report, "The Russian Northern Fleet. Sources of Radioactive Contamination." Bellona is a small group. We set a goal of solving a regional problem related to accumulation of nuclear fuel and radioactive waste in the Barents Sea region and in the White Sea region," Nikitin said.

Murmansk Shipping Company's nuclear fuel support vessel Imandra defuelled a general-purpose nuclear submarine at Nerpa shipyard at the Kola Peninsula December 14 in an operation called experimental by Murmansk officials.

"It is not only a problem of the Russian territories and of people who lived in Murmansk and Arkhangel'sk regions. It is a problem of Scandinavia and of Europe. It is a problem of the northern seas and oceans. In no other region in the world the density of nuclear instalments is as high as there. In no other region in the world the spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste are stored in such terrible conditions. In no other sea region there are as many decommissioned nuclear submarines that contain nuclear fuel in their reactors," said Nikitin.

"I don't know of another region where as many potentially nuclear and radioactive dangerous activities would be carried out on a daily basis. And finally," he said, "we don't know where there would be as many nuclear sites that are not controlled not only by international, but not even by Russian State safety inspections in the field of nuclear energy. These reasons, let alone the reasons I have not named here, kept us from being ignorant to the situation in the Kola Peninsula and Severodvinsk."