Zvezdochka ('Asterisk') Shipping Enterprise (Severodvinsk)

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The state engineering enterprise Zvezdochka [Zvyozdochka] is a large industrial company located in Northwest Russia. The company employs 8000 qualified workers, has modern slips, floating docks, ship transporting cars, quays, workshops with up-dated equipment. It is home to the 339th separate brigade of submarines under construction and repair under command of CO 1st-Class Captain Nikolai Andreev.

The Zvezdochka enterprise, located across the bay from the SevMash Shipyard in Severodvinsk, builds and repairs submarines. During the Cold War, Russian workers at Zvezdochka maintained ballistic missile submarines. Zvezdochka, formerly known as Ship Repair Plant 893, was commissioned in 1954. A 1959 Soviet decree granted Zvezdochka the task of repairing nuclear submarines, which began in 1962. By a 1967 decree, Zvezdochka was assigned responsibility for repairing the nuclear icebreaker, Lenin.

In 1992, the plant was renamed the Zvezdochka State Machine-Building Enterprise. Zvezdochka operates two railway slips; a floating dock; three well-equipped docks; and repair, machine-building, and auxiliary shops. Since its establishment, Zvezdochka has repaired and modernized over 100 first-, second-, and third-generation submarines. In 1998 it was designated as the only shipyard that would repair Delta IV-class submarines. To deal with dismantlement problems Zvezdochka has built three specialized areas for cutting submarine hulls.

Today, they spend their days using American-supplied equipment and technology to dismantle Soviet-era vessels. The metal subs are cut into 20-ton sections that are then chopped, formed and pressed into cubic-meter blocks. The European-standard-sized chunks can be smelted all over the continent. The United States provided all of Zvezdochka's scrapyard machinery and infrastructure. US-funded construction is under way for processing facilities that will remove the subs' nuclear fuel and radioactive wastes and convert them into forms suitable for long-term storage or reuse.

By 1996, so much waste had accumulated at Zvezdochka that there was a danger of a serious environmental disaster. On 10 September 1999 a complex for storage of liquid radioactive wastes opened at Zvezdochka after 14 months of construction. The complex was built by Russian workers with Norwegian management and financing, within the framework of Norwegian and Russian governments' agreement on utilisation of Russian nuclear submarines with the aim to improve nuclear and radiotion safety in the region.

Responsibility for decomissioned nuclear-powered submarines was transferred from the Defence Ministry to the Ministry of the Atomic Energy in late 1998 under Government Resolution No.518. Consequently, all the operations for the dismantling of nuclear-powered submarines and ships was transferred totally to the industrial sector -- the defence enterprises Zvezdochka and Nerpa located in the North, and Zvezda in the Far East -- the three Russian enterprises that scrap old submarines.

In addition, Zvezdochka is involved in a number of conversion programs, including the development of floating offshore drilling units; the retrofitting of fishing boats and research vessels; and the manufacture of propeller screws, blades, floating landing docks, pontoons, pontoon bridges, and some consumer goods. In October 1998, construction started on the first of 20 fishing trawlers, part of the Russian-Norwegian "Rebirth of the Arkhangelsk Oblast Fishing Fleet" program. Zvezdochka also repairs foreign-owned submarines, such as the Project 877 EKM diesel submarine owned by the Indian Navy. In 1998 Zvyozochka built for Gazprom a semi-submersible jack-up rig for prospecting offshore fields in the Barents and Pechora seas. The project to build the rig originated in 1994. Another was built at Sevmash.

Pr. Mashinostroiteley 12, 164509 Severodvinsk,
Arkhangelsk region, Russia
Tel.: +7(818-42) 7 93 60
Fax : +7(818-42) 7 28 50

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