There are wrecks that stay topical since they never actually get out of service- just on a new mode. The K-278 Komsomolets, the titanium-hulled one-off Soviet attack submarine, continues to be functional to this day as an agonizingly slow but radioactive corrosion experiment into how high-tech engineering, human factors and radioactive equipment interact once the lights have been turned off.
The boat, commissioned in 1983 and named by NASA as the Mike-class, was made of a titanium inner pressure hull designed to push the performance of deep diving well beyond the ability of conventional steel boats to withstand it on a regular basis. The design was among those which gained its reputation honestly: in 1984, a record-depth 3,350 feet, underlined a platform that was designed to explore the outer fringe of Soviet sub-sea operations and not merely to imitate regular fleet submarines. It was a foretaste of the future too in terms of submarine design, whereby less sailors, more systems and less space to improvise when the unexpected occurs, due to the relatively small crew size and the high extent of automation. The surprise was in the form of fire.
An electrical fault on April 7, 1989 ignited a fire in the aft spaces and the crew spent about six hours containing the fire as heat, smoke and cascading system damage confined the submarine to a narrowing number of choices. The connection of the fire with the high-pressure air system of the submarine was decisive, as mentioned in subsequent studies and reports: after it was broke, compressed air could supply the combustion and hasten the destruction of the components. The boat was dealing with an emergency hoisting up, and the engineering issue had long since been turned into a survival issue–men being forced on top had to exchange one life-threatening condition with another almost-freezing water.
That was followed by a savage lesson that escape hardware is just as well as the environment in which it is used. The sub had an experimental Soviet-style emergency rescue capsule, which was supposed to be a final safe ride home. In the example of Komsomolets, it entered the chain of casualties, among which was a malfunction on surfacing, which helped the loss of Captain Evgeny Vanin. Of the 69 people on board, 42 were killed, most of them through hypothermia or drowning following the escape out of the blaze.
The submarine then rested at the ocean floor at about 1,680 meters with a nuclear reactor and two nuclear-tipped torpedoes. It is this combination which made the wreck not a mere Cold War footnote. It emerged as an established environmental engineering issue – one that can be tracked, prevented, and debated but not correctly resolved.
Norwegian crews have made several revisions back to the location with new equipment that was unavailable at the time of the sub-marine. In 2019, a remotely controlled vehicle was deployed to a ventilation pipe to sample the water, which was measured at 800 becquerel per liter, in contrast to the average level of 0.001 Bq per liter, in the background. One of the researchers that worked on the work, Hilde Elise Heldal, has summarized the paradox in the following way: “What we have found has very little impact on Norwegian fish and seafood.” The depth, dilution, and lack of local biology are useful in keeping the risk localized, even in cases when a point-source measure appears dramatic.
Komsomolets lives on as a study in compound failure: a deep-subbing laboratory in which the missiles are combat-ready, and the crew was not entirely focused on the damage-control requirements of the boat, and an accident in which the “after” never fully materialized. Titanium purchased immunity not depth. The long tail of the wreck, which is a surveillance and testing and maintenance of the confidence of the populace demonstrates what occurs when the best features of a submarine outlived the scientist who designed them.
