Kosmos 954

Cosmos 954 was a Soviet ocean observation satellite with a nuclear reactor as a power source. Cosmos 954 belonged to the class of RORSAT satellite, which observed military and commercial vessels using active radar.

Incident

At the end of its life, the most radioactive contaminated reactor core should be separated from the satellite, and accelerated to a higher and safe orbit. Due to a technical incident failed this mechanism and the complete satellite entered the Earth's atmosphere on 24 January 1978. The remains of the satellite crashed on a 600 -kilometer-long strip of land between Great Slave Lake and Baker Lake ( Northwest Territories, Canada).

Search

The joint search operation in the USA and Canada called "Operation Morning Light ," among other things involved was the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, trying to salvage on foot and from the air as much material before melting the ice in the spring and further work would be tedious. To recover as much radioactive material, a total of 124,000 km ² premises have been searched. In the end, you hid twelve major debris whose activity probably was about one hundredth of the total activity of the satellite. For the search and for any other inserts made ​​Canada the Soviet Union, a bill in the amount of 6,041,174.70 Canadian dollars; the USSR finally paid three million Canadian dollars. The released activity of radioactive substances were 181 tera- becquerels ( TBq ) of 131I, 3 TBq 90Sr, 137Cs and some 3 TBq plutonium.