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Russian Nuclear-Powered Cargo Ship Catches Fire in Arctic

The Sevmorput icebreaker container ship. Rosatomflot

A fire erupted on board Russia’s Sevmorput nuclear-powered cargo ship, authorities said Monday, adding that the blaze was quickly extinguished.

Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said it had dispatched crews to vessel manager Atomflot's base outside the Arctic city of Murmansk late on Sunday.

“It was established there was a fire in one of the Sevmorput cabins spanning 30 square meters,” the ministry said in a statement on its social media page.

Less than an hour later, it said that the fire was extinguished and there were no casualties. 

It did not disclose the cause of the fire or how close it was to the vessel’s reactor.

Atomflot, a subsidiary of state-owned nuclear energy corporation Rosatom, told the state-run TASS news agency that “there was no threat to the container ship’s reactor unit or its life support systems.”

The Sevmorput, one of Russia's four nuclear-powered merchant ships, was launched in 1988.

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