Now this is just cool. The northern coast of Russia is completely dark for half the year and during the Cold War, freighters needed a way to travel along the coast without crashing, but the region is so cold and god-forsaken that there’s usually nobody around to man lighthouses. Solution: build them to be autonomous and nuclear-powered. They’d be still going today if looters hadn’t stripped them of anything not bolted down, which apparently includes nuclear shielding, making many of these sites now nuclear deadzones from radiation.

Spooky.

via Warren Ellis