Yay! Soviet Day!
I don’t know how credible this is, or whether it was just planned and never built, but check out this Sovet nuclear reactor on tank treads:
I saw this on BoingBoing Gadgets, and they found it on Red Ferret, but according English Russia, the blog where it’s originally from:
Russian engineers have constructed the mobile nuclear power plants that were sucessfully used in distant parts of Russia. Those were small sized self moving fully functional atomic power plants with a small reactor inside. Just imagine, small nuclear power plants that could reach the destination points by themselves.
There were two basic models – tracked and on regular wheels …. After the Chernobyl disaster use of those was discontinued.
Also, check out their haunting pictures of abandoned Soviet-era Arctic lighthouses, which used to guide ships along the northern coastline, pre-GPS:
So, the 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.
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.
There’s something really intriguing about industrial decay. It’s like early-stages archaeology.
Grant Hamilton
