Fire aboard Russian nuclear sub kills two

MOSCOW - A fire on board a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea killed two crew members but there was no threat of a radiation leak, the navy said.

Russia's navy chief said the submarine was overdue for scheduled repairs -- raising fresh concerns about safety standards in the country's ageing submarine fleet.

Submarine safety has been under scrutiny since the Kursk atomic submarine sank in the Barents Sea six years ago, killing all 118 crew members.

The submarine, the St Daniel of Moscow, has been towed back to port. Navy commander-in-chief Admiral Vladimir Masorin said the fire broke out in an electricity control panel, away from the reactor, and was put out by the crew.

The victims, a 28-year-old sailor and a 35-year-old warrant officer, had been fighting the fire. They died of smoke inhalation.

"It seems likely our equipment has let us down again," Masorin was shown saying on the Rossiya state television. "This boat is 16 years old and it is overdue for an overhaul."

He added though that running repairs had been carried out and the vessel was in working order. Masorin said the fire was most likely caused by a short circuit.

The submarine was north of the Rybachiy peninsula near Russia's border with Finland when it caught fire, Interfax news agency quoted navy sources as saying.

It is a Viktor class attack submarine armed with torpedoes but not nuclear weapons, said defence experts. It was not clear whether the St Daniel of Moscow carried any weapons on mission.

It entered service in 1990, making it one of the fleet's more modern submarines. The same submarine had a fire in its torpedo compartment in 1994, said Norwegian environmental group Bellona, which monitors Russia's submarine fleet.

"This is a very serious incident," said Alexander Nikitin, a former nuclear engineer in the Russian navy who now works as an environmental campaigner.

A tug towed the vessel to Vidyayevo, a Russian submarine base on the Barents Sea about 50km north of the Russian city of Murmansk.

Interfax quoted a navy source as saying: "The device protecting the nuclear reactor was activated. There is no radioactive contamination threat whatsoever."

Norway's radiation safety authority, which has measuring stations near the area, said it had not registered any radioactivity above normal.

But the fire may have damaged electrical systems vital for controlling the reactor, said Nikitin, who was briefly jailed on treason charges in the 1990s after writing a report on radioactive contamination from Russian submarines.

"All the pumps for cooling the reactor draw their power from the electrical equipment compartment where the fire was," he told Reuters.

Russia has the world's second biggest submarine fleet after the United States and many of the vessels date back to the Soviet Union.

Environmental campaigners -- and Western governments -- worry about the condition of some of the vessels, especially decommissioned atomic submarines that are rusting in docks as they wait to be dismantled.

The Kursk was the deadliest accident to hit Russia's submarine fleet but there has also been a spate of fires, breakdowns and spills of radioactive materials.

- REUTERS