hunt for red october reactor meltdown in the book

The first reactor was estimated somewhere around 90-97% complete, with 37% of equipment fully installed the second reactor had not reached more than 30% completion. The money from Moscow dried up, and in September 1992, Fidel Castro announced the Juragua project temporarily suspended. However, the fall of the Soviet Union would have a crippling effect on the project.

Progress was slow, owing to the fact that inexperienced Cuban engineers had to be supervised by Russia’s own nuclear experts… and by 1992, Moscow was tentatively suggesting a 1995-6 completion date for the first reactor. Nevertheless, the Cuban-Soviet team pushed on with the construction. One can only imagine their growing horror then, when in 1986, another Soviet reactor went into critical meltdown at the Chernobyl facility in Ukraine. The Juragua site lays just 180 miles south of Florida’s Key West and the US was less than enthusiastic about having two 440-megawatt Soviet-built nuclear power reactors at their back door, citing the potential for an accident as a “threat to its national security”. The United States, however, opposed Cuba’s nuclear program from the get-go. The Cubans even built a new city to house the site’s workers, “Ciudad Nuclear”, which to this day stands largely empty and unfinished ( more about that soon…).

Ĭonstruction began in 1983, as the foundations were lain for the two reactors along with a sizeable turbine hall at a site close to the Caribbean. Funded with Soviet money, early projections suggested that the completion of the first reactor alone would have catered to over 15% of Cuba’s energy needs.

It probably doesn’t help matters that most of the vehicles here are gas-guzzling “Yank Tanks” the country has an estimated 60,000 classic American cars on the road today, high consumption Chevrolet, Ford and Dodge vehicles, which were shipped over prior to the 1962 trade embargo.Ĭuba’s revolutionary government, headed by Fidel Castro, had long been looking for a solution in the form of nuclear energy… and that solution seemed to arrive in 1976, after talks between Cuba and the USSR resulted in an agreement to construct a twin-reactor nuclear plant near the southern town of Juragua. On Cuba’s Caribbean coast, there stands a monument to another age an age when this island’s friendship with the Soviet Union posed a growing concern for Cuba’s North American neighbours.Ĭuba depends heavily on imported fuel.

Hunt for red october reactor meltdown in the book