The World - News from May 2, 1989

A Soviet nuclear-powered submarine that sank off Norway last month could harm marine ecology and human health for tens of thousands of years, the environmental group Greenpeace said in London. A Greenpeace study said that if the submarine’s reactors are not retrieved, they could eventually release up to 20 million curies of radioactivity into the ocean and marine food chains. This would be equal to a third of the radioactivity released into the air by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, the report said. Norwegian officials have not detected any radiation so far from the submarine, which sank in the Norwegian Sea April 7 with the loss of 42 lives after an explosion and fire.