On December 3, 1959, the Soviet Union launched the Lénine, the world's first nuclear-powered icebreaker and the first civilian ship to use a nuclear reactor for propulsion. Designed to navigate the icy waters of Siberia and open a reliable route along the northern maritime passage, the Lénine was a technological marvel of its time. Its construction, spanning over three years, involved more than 500 companies and resulted in a 134-meter-long ship built to withstand the harsh conditions of Arctic ice. Unlike traditional icebreakers, which required frequent refueling, the Lénine used only 45 grams of uranium-235 per day, vastly improving its operational range. This allowed it to stay at sea for months, escorting merchant ships through ice-covered waters where conventional vessels would have been forced to retreat. Over thirty years of service, the Lénine traveled an impressive 654,400 nautical miles, with 560,600 of those miles through ice. It played a key role in opening parts of the Northeast Passage, a strategic Arctic route. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev praised the ship in 1960, calling it proof that civil nuclear power could be used for peaceful purposes. However, the ship faced two major technical incidents in 1965 and 1967, which were kept secret by the Soviet government for over two decades. In 1965, a coolant loss occurred during refueling, and in 1967, a cooling system leak required workers to break through a protective shield of concrete and metal to locate the problem. The damage from this repair was found to be irreparable, leading to the replacement of the ship’s three reactors with two newer OK-900 models. This upgrade, completed in 1970, left the Lénine out of commission for several years. The Lénine was decommissioned in 1989, not due to environmental conditions but because of mechanical wear from thirty years of breaking through ice. The political climate of the late 1980s, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika, made it increasingly difficult to justify the high costs of maintaining an aging vessel with nuclear reactors. In 1990, spent nuclear fuel was removed from the ship, marking the end of all nuclear operations aboard. After being taken out of service and decontaminated in 1989, the Lénine remained docked for years before being transformed into a museum in 2005. Today, it is displayed at Atomflot, the Russian nuclear icebreaker base in Murmansk, with its interiors preserved in their original 1950s condition.