Russia Proposes to be World's Nuclear Dump

by Sergei Blagov

But environmental activists lashed out the plans, saying Russia has enough of its own waste problems and should not become the world's nuclear dump site.

Minatom's "widespread practice of irresponsible handling radioactive waste causes more question than answers," said Natalia Mironova, head of the Movement for Nuclear Safety, a Chelyabinsk-based non governmental organization.

"The Ministry's promises to allocate some $200 million, or two percent of the expected proceeds are laughable," she told IPS.

The Russian law forbids the importing of radioactive waste or nuclear materials from other countries for long-term storage or burial. Only countries using Russian-built nuclear power plants or technology can send nuclear waste to Russia -- in line with bilateral deals.

Nevertheless, Minatom has offered to reprocess $10-12 billion worth of nuclear waste from around the world at its Chelyabinsk plant.

According to the international environmental group Greenpeace, minister Yevgeny Adamov has extended the offer to Switzerland, Germany, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

Storing other countries' nuclear waste in Russia is still illegal, but Minatom "cynically" promised its potential customers to lobby in Parliament in order to amend such legislation, Mironova said.

These days Minatom -- and minister Adamov -- are trying to push through in Parliament an amendment that will allow the ministry to take in thousands of metric tons of spent nuclear fuel.

For the purpose, Minatom has drafted a bill called "On reprocessing and storage of nuclear fuel."

Russian NGOs -- notably those from the regions most affected by nuclear incidents and careless disposal of waste -- have urged the State Duma (the lower chamber of parliament), not to pass the legislation sought by Minatom.

The ban on importing waste should be rescinded, and the bill must not be approved -- as its is "threatening Russia's national security," the NGO's argue.

Their concern was supported by some Government officials, like Viktor Danilov-Danilian, chairman of Russia's State Committee for Environmental Protection, who last week asked the Government to reject the bill as detrimental to "Russia's ecological security."

"Minatom's arguments are absurd," said Andrei Talevlin, a Chelyabinsk-based environmental activist, " they intend to spoil the environment first and deal with the consequences later."

The Minatom-managed Chelyabinsk-65 Reprocessing Plant, or NPO Mayak, is known for a series of accidents. In 1957 a high-level waste storage facility exploded, spreading nuclear emissions. More than 10,000 people had to be evacuated.

The nearby Karachay lake was used between 1948 and well into the 1970's to dump untreated high-level waste.

A dike was built to prevent contaminated water from mixing with flood waters. But in 1967 a severe draught dried up the lake, whose bed was covered by radioactive dust later spread by winds over some 2,000-3,000 square kilometres, including six settlements with 41,500 inhabitants.

The Karachay lake, with its 400 million cubic meters of radioactive water is an unprecedented ecological disaster, argues Mironova, but Minatom call it "the technology to dump liquid radioactive waste over the landscape," she said.

"People are extremely worried about the deteriorating environment," said Nadezhda Kutepova, activist of Movement for Nuclear Safety in Chelyabinsk-65.

Roughly half of Chelyabinsk's three million residents have been exposed to radioactivity, argues Milya Kabirova, head of a group of women who suffer - themselves or their children- radiation- originated illnesses.

"Now every third kid in the Chelyabinsk region is sick-- it amounts to extermination of people," she said.

"Only Russian nuclear facilities continue pumping liquid radioactive waste into the soil, while this ugly practice has been abandoned worldwide," says Mikhail Piskunov, head of the Civil Initiatives Centre in Dimitrovgrad, Central Russia.

A Dimitrovgrad-based nuclear research centre is also blamed of dumping waste.

So far the "Siberian Chemical Combine" or Tomsk-7 Reprocessing Plant has alone pumped some 40 million cubic meters of liquid radioactive waste into the soil, said Konstantin Kozlov, head of the Tomsk-based Student Ecological Inspection.

In terms of radiation it equals some 120 Chernobyls (the Ukrainian nuclear power plant which melted down in 1986) -- and it goes against every Russian environmental law, he said.

Over the 1960s and 1970s Tomsk-7 Reprocessing Plant also experienced a number of accidents, including explosions with fatal casualties.

Since the Soviet collapse in 1991, the US and other countries have funneled several billion dollars to help Russia dismantle and destroy its weapons of mass destruction, including aid to dispose waste in a safe way.

NGOs argue that Russia's largest waste storage facility -- Krasnoyarsk-26 --- has some 3,000 tons of unused capacity, but Minatom plans anticipate more than 10,000 tons of foreign radioactive waste for reprocessing and storage.

Russia is planning to build a new nuclear waste storage site in a remote northern region because existing facilities have been filled to capacity.

The new storage site could be built either on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the far north or the Chukotka Peninsula in the far northeast.

But there is no date yet for starting the construction, while the cost and capacity of the site have not yet been established. The project has not been included in the Government's budgetary allocations either.

Minatom has also been accused of conspiring with overseas nuclear power operators in exchange for personal benefits. According to newspaper reports, minister Adamov is a protege of controversial tycoon and Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky.

"Minatom's actions border outright corruption," argues Mironova. "No big wonder that the whereabouts of initial proceeds from the HEU-LEU deal became a matter of debate."

HEU-LEU is a deal by which the United States has agreed to buy 500 tons of highly enriched uranium from Russia to fuel American commercial nuclear power reactors.

However, it remains to be seen whether Russia could tackle its huge nuclear waste problems with a backdrop of continuing economic slide -- when many officials seem attracted by the argument "money doesn't smell -- or irradiate."

"Russia needs a healthy economy -- including the most efficient ways to funnel funds allocated for environment protection," Danilov-Danilian, the chairman of Russia's State Committee for the Environmental Protection, told IPS.