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MURMANSK (Russia): It’s June and as Russians swarm south for their annual beach holidays, Stanislav Rumyantsev has rather different plans — he’s preparing to head for the North Pole.
As captain of the atomic icebreaker Yamal, he will be spending his summer smashing through the ice of the Arctic Ocean, taking tourists to the top of the world and providing a lifeline to Russia’s north.
“It’s fine, there’s nothing tough about it. I’ve been to the North Pole at least five times,” said Rumyantsev, his ship towering over the wharves of Russia’s Arctic port of Murmansk, half way between Moscow and the North Pole.
At the Yamal’s heart — a spotless room lined with humming banks of computers covered in flashing lights and fast-changing displays — technicians checked the controls of its two nuclear reactors and steam turbines.
Russia is unique in having a nuclear icebreaker fleet, allowing its ships to cover its long and frozen northern coast. But the fleet is ageing, and some are concerned that Russia’s Arctic towns, which depend on it for food, will not be able to survive.
Although Russia has exploited the Arctic since mediaeval fur traders discovered its riches, it moved in seriously only in the 1950s and 1960s, when the first atomic icebreaker could for the first time sail quickly from one end of Russia to the other.
By the late 1980s, the Northern Sea Route was carrying 6.7 million tons annually, but the economic meltdown of the 1990s slashed cargoes and it now sees only 1.7 million tons a year.
“In the last three or four years, trade has stabilized since the collapse,” said Anatoly Gorshkovsky, who heads the Northern Sea Route administration at the transport ministry.
NONE BUILT: The collapse of the Soviet Union halted icebreaker building, and the Murmansk Shipping Company, which manages the fleet for the state, is having to run some vessels well past their life span, often using them for tourist excursions to raise money. Some 5,000 people have travelled on Russian icebreakers to the North Pole.
“Atomic icebreakers are crucial to the Northern Sea Route. All through these hard economic times, they have kept operating, if they weren’t necessary, they would have stopped,” said Mustafa Kashka, who runs the company’s icebreaker division.
The majority of cargo — between 1.2 to 1.4 million tons, according to government figures — is linked to Norilsk Nickel, a company carved out of the tundra in Russia’s far north and the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium.
It has been exploring other methods of getting its metals to the market, and even suggested using submarines last year, but currently relies on icebreakers, and the Murmansk Shipping Company’s cargo ships.
The Murmansk Shipping Company says it also works with many of the biggest names in the Russian energy sector — including LUKOIL, Gazprom and YUKOS — and looks set to benefit from a giant oil export terminal proposed for Murmansk by Russia’s largest oil companies.
It expects the amount of cargo it ships to boom in the next decade, as Russian energy companies start extracting oil and gas from the Arctic shelf.
“We are expecting to ship five million tons annually after a few years, and by 2015, we expect to ship 12 to 20 million, with most being oil,” said a company spokesman.
LIFELINE: Icebreakers are not just important for the companies of the far north, but crucial for feeding their workers and heating their houses during the long, bitter winter.
According to government statistics, four-fifths of food reaches the towns of the far north by sea, the majority in ships following an icebreaker.—Reuters
