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www.mosnews.com/features/2009/05/12/icebreakerhotel/

World’s first atomic-powered ship, icon of the Cold War, to reopen as museum-hotel
12 May

The Lenin, the nuclear icebreaker launched in 1959, has found a new life. Moored in the far-northern city of Murmansk, the 134-m. (440-ft.) long ship will house a museum, luxury hotel, conference center, sports complex and restaurants.

The Lenin was launched with three nuclear reactors that produced steam to turn the turbines generating the electricity that drove the ship’s 44,000-hp propellers. The system was a marvel at the time. The ship cleared paths for over 3700 ships to sail through the icy waters of the Northern Sea, according to Russia Info Centre, traveling 654,000 nautical miles, which is equivalent to the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

In spite of its late start with atomic weapons, the Soviet Union was far ahead of the game when it came to peaceful uses of the atom. The first ever nuclear power plant was launched in Kaluga Region in 1954. Soviet science was in its heyday at the time. The next year, the first passenger jet airliner, the Tu-104, took off. It was the only plane of its type to make regular flights until 1958. In 1957, the USSR launched the first artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth.

In spite of the fact that the US had a similar project well underway, the success of Sputnik 1, as the satellite was known as, caused a wave of hysteria in the competing superpower, with reactions ranging from increased government spending for science (and eventually the founding of NASA) to pioneer rocker Little Richard Penniman’s religious conversion. (Little Richard reportedly saw Sputnik in the sky while performing at an outdoor concert and took it as a message from God.)

And then Yury Gagarin made the first manned space flight in 1961, circling the Earth in 108 minutes.

The Lenin, construction of which began in 1956, played a worthy role in the era’s Cold War posturing. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and US Vice President Richard Nixon visited it. Later Cuban leader Fidel Castro would see it as well, according to Lenta.ru.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Oslo-based environmental group Bellona revealed that there had been two serious accidents involving the Lenin. In 1965, it was discovered that operator error had damaged some of the fuel assemblies. The entire set of them was removed, sealed in a special cask and eventually thrown into the sea. In 1967, the reactor itself had to be replaced after it was damaged while workers searched for a leak in it. That work took until 1970.

The Lenin was decommissioned in 1989, when the decades of plowing through meters-thick ice began to tell on its hull. After testing in the 1990s, the idea of turning the ship into a museum was advanced in 2000, but implemented slowly. The first journalists, from Russia and Scandinavia, saw the ship in its new incarnation this weekend, according to Vesti.ru. Only a single exhibition hall has been completed. The remainder of the ship still looks much as it did when it was working.

A US nuclear-powered cargo ship, the Savannah, was started in 1956 and went into service in 1962, but with much lower PR effect than the Lenin had. It was financially and technically unfeasible and was decommissioned in 1972. The US government has been unsuccessful in its search for investors ready to convert it into a museum.

Germany and Japan also created nuclear ships, but they performed unimpressively. Russia has had better results. Russia has built seven nuclear icebreakers, including the Lenin, five other ships (four of them military) and 250 nuclear-powered submarines, according to Bellona. It is also said to be planning new icebreakers. Bellona has noted serious issues with the storage of used fuel and maintenance of the nuclear fleet, particularly with one ship, the Lepse, which has been moored near Murmansk in damaged condition since 1984.