Sometimes, as a traveler, you find yourself in situations whose danger you don’t fully appreciate until later. At the time, what you might be thinking is “How bizarre,” or as happened to Bob Payne during a trip to the North Pole aboard the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Yamal, “The ship was built by the same people who built Chernobyl?”
Here’s a slightly revised telling of one incident from Bob Payne’s North Pole story, which first appeared in the January 1995 Conde Nast Traveler magazine.
The Yamal, which had been converted to a kind of cruise vessel (mostly by painting what looked like the smiling teeth of a very happy killer whale across the bow) ran on a match-book-size supply of enriched uranium, and at some point during the journey to the North Pole a handful of the passengers, possibly the ones who had been asking the most annoying questions, were invited for a tour of its reactor room.
The tour started badly. The Yamal’s chief reactor engineer, speaking through an interpreter, a young woman whose career Payne had already put in jeopardy by teaching her to say “Hold your horses,” began his remarks only to have them interrupted with “Louder please,” from someone in the back of the room. The translator and the chief conferred, then the translator, responded: “The chief asks please no questions till end.”
Passing through the Yamal’s Starship Enterprise-like control room, where Payne inquired, without success, about who might control cabin heat, the passengers were lead into a locker room, where they were given smocks, caps, gloves, and thin rubber boots that slipped over their regular shoes. Each passenger was also given a tiny radiation-measuring device, no doubt like the ones used at Chernobyl, that they pinned to their smocks.
With the rods sticking out of the tops of the reactors, and with some large metal tanks mounted high on the wall, the Yamal’s reactor room itself looked more than anything else like the milking room of a modern dairy. Except you would expect the cows to have two heads.
Payne started to ask something, but once again he was told to hold his questions until later. Which was unfortunate, because he said he really needed to know if it was safe to scratch his nose.
Wofratz/Wikimedia Commons Photo.
