Norway Helped Manage a Soviet Nuclear Legacy for 25 Years. Russia’s War Changed Everything

For 25 years, Norway funded one of the most important environmental programmes in the Arctic. The Andreeva Bay nuclear storage facility on the Kola Peninsula, roughly sixty kilometres from the Norwegian border, held approximately 22,000 spent uranium fuel assemblies from decommissioned Soviet submarines in three severely deteriorating concrete tanks. Whilst Russia lacked the institutional will and financial capacity to address it, Norway did not wait to be asked.

Via the bilateral Norwegian-Russian Commission on Nuclear Safety, Oslo channelled over two billion kroner into stabilising the site, including roads, electrical infrastructure, modernised handling facilities and the removal of spent fuel to Mayak reprocessing plant in the Russian interior.

Norway was not alone in this effort. The UK contributed funding to the cleanup of Andreeva Bay through the EBRD-managed Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership, whilst British expertise also played a direct technical role.

Then came Russia's war against Ukraine in February 2022, and alongside the cessation of Russia-Western relations, the commission ceased to function. Thus, the remaining work entered into an undefined limbo. International collaboration on the wider Arctic nuclear legacy, considerably larger and more dangerous than Andreeva Bay alone, was left without any direct active management mechanism.

The cessation of bilateral work at Andreeva Bay is the most visible element of what is a substantially larger problem. On the floor of the Barents Sea, the Soviet nuclear submarine K-159 lies with two intact reactors and spent nuclear fuel still aboard, in waters that are home to one of the world’s most productive cod fisheries and upon which Norwegian coastal communities directly depend.

The submarine K-27, deliberately scuttled in the Kara Sea in 1982 with its liquid metal cooled reactors still loaded, presents yet another significant challenge at greater distance, in much shallower water than K-159. During the Soviet period, several thousand containers of solid and liquid radioactive waste were dumped across the Barents and Kara Seas.

The urgency is sharpening for two compounding reasons. Pre-2022 structural assessments indicated that corrosion in wreck sites was accelerating, compressing the timeline within which safe intervention remains technically feasible. Simultaneously, the significant increase in Russian military activity across the High North since 2022 has materially reduced access for international monitoring and research vessels in the Barents. Therefore, the data required to underpin any future cleanup effort is itself degrading over time. Ultimately, the problem is worsening at precisely the moment when the capacity to assess it is diminishing.

Although existing international nuclear mechanisms remain vital, they were not designed to address this specific regional problem. The International Atomic Energy Agency verifies state compliance with nuclear safeguarding obligations and provides technical assistance, but it is not an operational remediation body and has no mandate to coordinate the physical recovery of sunken reactors or the clean-up of contaminated seabeds. For decades, the Joint Norwegian-Russian Commission on Nuclear Safety helped fill this gap by providing a dedicated forum for cooperation on nuclear safety and environmental issues in the Arctic. Its suspension following the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West has left a significant institutional gap, and no equivalent mechanism has emerged to replace it.

A partial alternative has already been demonstrated. The Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation programme (AMEC), established in 1996, brought together the US, Russia and Norway, coordinating work on post-Cold War nuclear safety in the High North for the better part of a decade before quietly winding down in the mid-2000s. AMEC did not match the longevity of the bilateral Andreeva Bay arrangement, and it operated in a considerably less hostile security environment than today's, prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the broader collapse in relations with the West. Yet it showed that trilateral cooperation on Arctic nuclear safety was achievable even across real political differences, and that workable institutional architecture for cooperation could be built from a standing start. Its underlying logic, that certain environmental risks in the Arctic are shared regardless of political climate, has not weakened since its closure. In fact, it has become considerably more urgent.

A revived multilateral Arctic nuclear remediation framework, modelled loosely on AMEC and structured as a Nordic-led consortium operating under IAEA partnership, would not require Russian participation to begin meaningful work. Environmental monitoring of internationally accessible sites and the development of institutional architecture for eventual physical remediation could all be initiated without Moscow's immediate involvement.

Ultimately, the wrecks of greatest concern, K-159 and K-27, lie in Russian-claimed waters, and no multilateral mechanism can conduct physical remediation there without Moscow's distant cooperation. Yet this does not render interim action meaningless. K-159 sits at roughly 200 m depth in the Barents Sea, in waters adjacent to areas of intensive international fishing activity; radionuclides from a hull breach would not respect any maritime boundary. Passive monitoring, remote sensing and oceanographic modelling can still be conducted from internationally accessible waters, whilst broader environmental monitoring in adjacent waters remains possible without direct participation in remediation activities.

Much of what a revived consortium would do in its early phase is not physical recovery but the construction of the architecture that physical recovery will eventually require: shared monitoring baselines, agreed technical standards, pooled expertise and a standing body ready to act when geopolitical conditions permit. A Western-led monitoring and standards framework would mean that any future window for cooperation does not open onto an empty institutional space.

An Arctic Council-adjacent technical body could provide the multilateral umbrella through which Norway, the UK and the US coordinate both expertise and resources. It is safe to assume that such a step would not be received neutrally in Moscow. Russia could plausibly respond in either direction: a quietly cooperative posture, recognising that radiological risk to its own Northern Fleet legacy and fisheries does not serve Russia itself, or a hostile framing, with any NATO-adjacent involvement with Soviet nuclear material viewed as encirclement or intelligence gathering under environmental cover.

Past Russian rhetoric around Western Arctic engagement makes the second response plausible. Whilst that risk is real, it does not argue against building the mechanism. It argues for designing it, from the outset, in explicitly civilian and environmental terms, with IAEA and Nordic civilian leadership rather than any defence ministry in the lead role, so that a future Russian government has the clearest possible path back into a framework that was never closed to it, only suspended by its own choice to walk away.

Precedent already grants a realistic sense of the potential financial scale. Over its operational lifetime, AMEC projects received approximately $41.4 million in total, contributed by participating nations: roughly $25 million from the US, $9.9 million from Norway and $6.5 million from Russia. The UK was also a participant. By the standards of contemporary defence and environmental budgets, these are modest funds, but they allowed for a sustained programme of spent fuel container design and radiological monitoring across the most hazardous sites.

A revived mechanism would not require Russian financial participation at the outset. Initial capitalisation could potentially be drawn from Nordic states, the Nordic Council of Ministers’ environmental budget lines and the IAEA's technical cooperation fund, with the UK and US contributing on a basis consistent with their original AMEC involvement. The figures involved are ultimately small relative to the long-term value of the Barents Sea fisheries, fisheries on which Norwegian coastal communities and a significant share of European whitefish supply depend.

This is not a proposal for a new bureaucracy. It is a proposal to fill a gap that a functioning mechanism once occupied, at the moment of greatest environmental and security need since the Cold War ended. The K-159's reactors are corroding on the Barents seabed and international monitoring has been interrupted. The bilateral framework that managed this problem for a generation is suspended with no resumption in sight.

Norway should not be left managing an inherited nuclear problem in a deteriorating security environment, largely alone. It was Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the breakdown in relations that followed it, that closed the mechanism managing this risk, not any failure on Norway's part or any change in the underlying environmental danger. The Arctic environment does not care who stopped cooperating with whom.