The former Soviet Union built approx 250 nuclear powered submarines.<p>Many of which rotted alongside piers for decades in the post Soviet collapse.<p>Literally rotted.<p>Western aid was provided to fund decommissioning and secure removal of nuclear materials with an emphasis on preventing nuclear proliferation.<p>It was a long-term and very messy project with numerous accidents and high likelihood of corruption and lack of audit and accountability.<p>If I had to hazard a guess, the die off is related to improper decommissioning and handling of Russian nuclear submarines.<p>Imagine the horrifically corrupt world of Italian organised crime brought to life by Robert Saviano(Gomorrah) with terrible examples of improper hazardous waste disposal scaled up to 1000x in the remote region of Kamchatka where Russian organised crime has had great influence and you have a recipe for disaster.<p>Just the known incidents involving Russian nuclear submarines in the Kamchatka area are horrific.<p>Preventing this disaster would have required even more aggressive effort back in the 90’s.<p>Commercial Uranium prices were suppressed in the 90’s/00’s due to the program to decommission Russian nuclear material and recycling it in western commercial reactors.<p>But the big effort made clearly wasn’t enough to stop this disaster.<p>The effort may have prevented nuclear proliferation, but it didn’t prevent environmental disaster.<p>You couldn’t pay me ten million dollars to swim or surf in proximity of old Russian nuke boats.