Soviet submarine K-131

K-131 was a Project 675 (NATO reporting name Echo II-class submarine) of the Soviet Navy's Northern Fleet, she was also redesignated K-192.

Design and description
The Echo II class was a nuclear-powered cruise-missile submarine, which could carry up to eight anti-ship missiles, designed to strike any aircraft carrier-borne nuclear threat. The missiles could be either conventional or nuclear and all eight fired within twenty minutes. The submarine would need to be surfaced and carried an array of electronics, radar and sonar to feed data to the missile while en route to its target. K-131 also had six 533 mm torpedo tubes forward and four 406 mm torpedo tubes aft.

With a displacement of 5,000 tons when surfaced and 6,000 tons when submerged, K-131 was 115 m long and had a beam of 9 m and a draft of 7.5 m. She was powered by two pressurized-water nuclear reactors generating 30,000 shp through two propellers for a maximum speed of 20 to 23 kn. She was manned by about 90 crew members.

Fire
On 18 June 1984, while under the command of Captain First Rank E. Selivanov, K-131 suffered a catastrophic fire while on patrol in the Norwegian Sea off the Kola Peninsula. A short circuit in an electrical switchboard in the eighth compartment ignited the clothes of an electrical officer, and spread first to other equipment in that compartment, then into the seventh compartment. Before it was extinguished, the fire had killed 13 men.

Aid
The fire affected one of the two reactors, forcing the submarine to surface. Using K-131's fresh water supplies, the submarine's crew managed to reduce the temperature in the burning compartments from 150 C to 108 C, but by this time the Soviet cargo ship Konstantin Yuon had arrived and hooked up a pipe to help. All the cooling water went into the ocean, and its radioactivity levels were unknown. The service ship Amur, which had a nuclear waste processing plant on board, then arrived to assist K-131. However, the heavily contaminated water caused Amurs treatment plant to break down. How much nuclear waste leaked into the ocean has never been fully verified.

Fate
After returning to the Soviet Union, K-131 was anchored in Ara Bay. Then she was towed to Russian Shipyard No. 10—Shkval. She was renamed K-192. On June 25, 1989 a serious leak occurred in a cooling pipe. Photos of the evaporating cooling water coming out from the reactor compartment became front-page news in Norway. The submarine was then stationed at the Ara-guba Naval base on the Kola Peninsula. At the end of November 1996 the Naval Yard in Polyarny defuelled the 37 years old K-5 submarine.