Excuse Me, Vlad …

On April 30^th I wrote about Vladimir Putin giving the Japanese hell for their handling of the Fukushima nuclear problems.

In that piece I asked: “How’s that plan to deal with the deteriorating nuclear-powered naval vessels going, or are you just going to let them continue to rust out and pollute the Arctic waters?”

Guess what, I got an answer: from Reuters via the ABC Russian icebreaker springs nuclear leak

Russia has launched an urgent rescue mission after one its its atom-powered icebreakers developed a nuclear leak in the frozen seas of the Arctic and was forced to abandon its mission.

The Rosatomflot nuclear fleet said in a statement that “insignificant increase in activity” had been reported on board its Taimyr icebreaker.

But the incident was serious enough to force the mammoth vessel to abandon its mission and try to track its way back to port in the north-west city of Murmansk.

“What we are most concerned about right now is movement along the waterways,” the RIA Novosti news agency quoted top Rosatomflot official Andrei Smirnov as saying.

The fleet official said another icebreaker was being dispatched to the region to help the vessel’s journey back to port.
…

But other details – including how many people were on board the ship – remained unclear and one part of the Russian statement suggested that officials were looking into the possibility of the situation becoming more serious.

“If the situation deteriorates, the reactor system will be shut down and the cooling process will begin,” Mr Rosatomflot said.

He stressed that the seriousness of the event at the moment could be registered as a zero on the seven-point International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale – a level officially defined as “bearing no safety significance”

I’m not sure that the crew of the vessel are quite as certain of there being no “safety significance” as the officials on shore.