MSNBC Article: Russia*s risky nuclear waste business

["Jim Hardeman" <Jim_Hardeman@mail.dnr.state.ga.us>]

Colleagues -

The following article appeared today on the MSNBC website at (http://www.msnbc.com/news/529379.asp?cp1=1). 

Jim Hardeman
Jim_Hardeman@mail.dnr.state.ga.us 

=======

Russia's risky nuclear waste business 
   
Government hopes to import
radioactive waste materials     
Russian lawmakers in the State Duma approved a law allowing Russia to import spent nuclear materials for reprocessing, the first step toward a program that could bring the country more money -- and more radioactive waste.
   
 
By Susan B. Glasser
THE WASHINGTON POST 
 
MUSLYUMOVO, Russia, Feb. 11 -  Nikolai Gidenko is one of the last of the "liquidators." He earned the title as a Red Army draftee in the 1950s, working to build a dam on the Techa River, sometimes immersed up to his knees in water. 

WHAT GIDENKO didn't know then was that the Techa River was a nuclear waste dump, a river of radioactivity more polluted than 20 Chernobyls. Today, Gidenko receives 200 rubles a month - less than $8 - as compensation for the radiation from the top-secret nuclear facility down the road that he was exposed to. In his dying village of 4,500 people, there are six cemeteries, five of them already full.

Which makes it all the more surprising when Gidenko answers with an unhesitating yes when asked if he favors the latest plan of Russia's cash-poor leaders: creating a haven for the world's nuclear leftovers. In exchange for what the government estimates could be a $21 billion windfall, the Russians intend to open their doors to more than 20,000 tons of spent fuel from foreign nuclear reactors for storage and possible reprocessing. Some of it is likely to end up in Gidenko's back yard.
       
'MOST POLLUTED PLACE ON EARTH'   
 
         Nationwide, the proposal has spurred the biggest grass-roots opposition movement in Russia's 10 years of democracy. But here in this region of the Ural Mountains almost 1,000 miles east of Moscow that environmentalists have dubbed "the most polluted place on earth," local leaders are lobbying heavily to make sure they receive their share of the radioactive paycheck.
       "I am in favor of importing the nuclear waste," Gidenko said last week in his wooden cottage as the temperature outside hit 20 degrees below zero. "They will reprocess it into fuel, and it will be cheaper for the population. They claim that electricity will be free."
       As Russia ventures into nuclear capitalism, Gidenko is not the only one dreaming of the benefits that foreign waste will bring. With the apparent support of President Vladimir Putin, the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, gave preliminary approval to the nuclear imports in December. Despite public opinion polls that show more than 90 percent of Russians oppose the plan, more than 90 percent of the deputies voted for it.
       
MORTGAGING HEALTH FOR CASH  
  
        "They have dollar signs in their eyes," said activist Natalya Mironova, who belongs to an environmental movement that gathered an unprecedented 2.5 million signatures for a national referendum to block the foreign waste, only to see the Central Election Commission invalidate just enough signatures to throw it off the ballot.
       To opponents of the plan like her, the fight is a morality tale about a country whose leaders are so cynical they would mortgage their land's health for some ready cash. It is also a political puzzle of sorts: In the increasingly authoritarian politics of the Putin era, no one is sure whether, or how, public pressure can influence the small group of policymakers that will decide the matter.
       At the same time, experts on both sides of the debate agree that Russia's stated reason for getting into the nuclear-waste business is legitimate: Nearly 60 years into the Atomic Age, Russia has found itself with a huge stockpile of nuclear waste from its own reactors and insufficient funds to handle it. Even without importing waste, some experts say Russia's current storage facility near Krasnoyarsk could be full in a few years.
       On the scale of environmental outrages in this already polluted country, several nuclear specialists argued, adding foreign spent fuel to that stockpile might not be as bad as the alternative: a nuclear waste storage crisis and no resources to deal with it.
      "Our problem is we have no money," said Nikolai Ponomarev-Stepnoi, deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, the leading Russian nuclear research facility on the outskirts of Moscow where tons of nuclear waste sit in containers awaiting a permanent home.
       
A PROFITABLE ENTERPRISE  
   
        Taking in spent fuel from abroad, he said, is the only commercially sensible way to proceed. There is a market, and those countries that will be the first to step into this market will be the ones to get the most profit. Considering that these services fetch high prices, if we react quickly we can earn such money as will help us deal with our spent fuel, as well as accepting somebody else's spent fuel.
       There are, however, numerous logistic - and diplomatic - problems with Russia's entry into this business. Most significant among them is whether Russia intends to recycle the fuel for use in nuclear power stations or simply store it.
       The United States is adamantly opposed to reprocessing spent fuel because the process extracts plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. As much as 70 percent of the world's spent nuclear fuel originated in U.S.-designed reactors, so even though it sits at nuclear power plants from Asia to Western Europe, the contracts give the U.S. final say on where it ends up. If Washington doesn't approve, Russia's $21 billion dream will go unrealized.
       Inside Russia, however, the Atomic Energy Ministry and its backers have talked almost exclusively about reprocessing the spent fuel, and not about storing it.
       "The Russians seem completely blind to this issue," said a former top Clinton administration official who handled the talks. Even so, the official said, U.S. policymakers have been sharply divided, with the Energy Department looking on Russia's import scheme favorably and the State Department insisting that it is "crazy to take more nuclear matter into a country still unable to deal with nuclear waste it already has."
       Added the official, "The storage crisis is real. The only question is whether Russia should be the site."
       
NUCLEAR EMPIRE-BUILDING

       In Moscow, critics say the atomic ministry's plan is to use the foreign funds not for storage, nor even to clean up existing environmental disaster zones like the one in Muslyumovo, but to finance a campaign of nuclear empire-building. Already, the ministry has announced plans to finish 10 new nuclear reactors over the next decade - without specifying where the funds will come from.     
       "The atomic ministry is acquiring the power it had in Soviet days, when it was an empire inside the empire, untouchable by anyone," said Alexei Yablokov, a founder of Russia's modern-day environmental movement. "But in reality, the ministry lacks money to finance its grand plans. In order to get the money, they will have to store this nuclear waste. Of course, it's very difficult for them to explain to people that we are taking for storage everybody's waste. So they pretend they will be reprocessing it and gaining valuable resources."
       The government's nuclear safety commission has publicly feuded with the ministry in hopes of blocking the foreign-waste proposal. "They use the seemingly noble explanation that Russia is unable to resolve our situation with nuclear wastes without receiving this money. We don't mind this in principle. But the true object is to use these funds from the import of spent fuel from abroad to continue developing nuclear energy," said Andrei Kislov, head of the commission's department of nuclear fuel cycle enterprises.
       
OPTIMISTIC FORECASTS  

        Such policy nuances are lost here in the Urals, where nuclear pork-barrel politics have taken hold in anticipation that Mayak, the secret nuclear facility up the river from the tainted village of Muslyumovo, will be the recipient of the foreign spent fuel.
       Indeed, a paycheck that may never come has already been spent hundreds of times over in the course of this public relations campaign. In the local capital of Chelyabinsk, a government-run newspaper proclaimed recently that "billions of dollars for the region" await only State Duma approval. The article even divvied up the area's supposed winnings: $3.8 billion for "ecological rehabilitation projects," $2.6 billion for modernizing the Mayak complex, and $3.6 billion for "the region's needs."  By this accounting, the government would spend $10 billion of the $21 billion windfall here - a highly unrealistic scenario.
       But that doesn't stop Chelyabinsk Deputy Gov. Gennady Podtyosov from reeling off a list of still more specific benefits for his region. In an interview, he offered up a dizzying array of ways to spend the foreign proceeds: rehabilitating the land, building housing for evacuees from the Techa River area, building hospitals and schools, paving roads and laying gas pipes.
       "The government is being forced to resort to this extreme measure," Podtyosov said. "We want people to realize it's being done for us, it's being done to improve our life."       

WAGES WORTH THE RISK  

     Two hours north of Chelyabinsk, inside the closed city of Ozersk, the same argument is being made to the 10,000-plus workers at the Mayak nuclear plant. Mayak produced the plutonium for the Soviets' first nuclear bomb and is still Russia's most important nuclear facility. It houses the country's only factory for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel — though it is currently equipped to work only with fuel from Soviet-built reactors. Accepting spent fuel from other countries will require a major upgrade that Mayak can't afford.
       "They say, 'It is necessary to do this. Then everyone will live here like in a fairy tale,' " said Nadezhda Kutepova, a sociologist in Ozersk. Her father came here to clean up a 1957 explosion that was the second-largest nuclear accident in history; he died 20 years later of colon cancer.
       Inside the city of more than 80,000 residents, she said, nostalgia flourishes for Soviet times, when the dangers of working at the nuclear plant were accompanied by higher wages, unrationed food and such luxuries as candy. In the poor neighboring villages, they had a name for the Mayak workers: "chocoladniki."
       "In Ozersk, people think those golden times will return," she said. "No one is thinking about the ecological damage; no one is thinking about nuclear weapons. We are only interested in our wages."
       
MATTER OF ECONOMIC SURVIVAL

         In a rare interview, Mayak General Director Vitaly Sadovnikov portrayed the proposal as a matter of economic survival for his underemployed plant. "Mayak is definitely interested in such an activity, as any enterprise is interested in work," he said.
       Over the years, Mayak's nuclear catastrophes - the 1949 to 1956 dumping in the Techa River, the 1957 explosion, and a 1967 cloud of radioactive dust from a nuclear waste-filled lake - have exposed more than 1 million people to dangerously high levels of radiation. The environmental disasters were a state secret until the waning days of Communism, but today Sadovnikov insists that safety is no longer an issue at his plant.
       Instead, he spoke only of "certain errors" and "certain consequences of the previous work of Mayak." Critics of the proposal to import spent nuclear fuel, he said, are guilty of "radiophobia."
       But there are indications of such radiophobia even among Mayak's relatively privileged workers. In a survey Kutepova conducted of 700 Ozersk residents last fall, 64 percent said they were against the proposal. "But they will not speak up," she said. "There is a code of silence. Yes, my father died. Yes, my relatives are ill. But I'll be paid my wages and I'll be silent."
       Ramses Faizullin decided not to be silent. The 16-year-old lives in one of the villages near Mayak that was relocated " all 750 people " from the banks of the Techa River years before he was born. Even so, Faizullin was born with radiation disease; his head is abnormally large and he coughs incessantly. Three times last year he was so sick he had to check into the hospital. His mother says she didn't even know the word "radiation" until after he was born.
       "They think that there are fools here," Faizullin said. "They treat us as if we don't understand anything."
       In December, Faizullin wrote a letter to Putin and the State Duma pleading with them to block the import of spent fuel. "I do not want to have children like myself," he wrote. "We have suffered our fill from this radiation as it is; every week, they bury somebody in our village."
       
       © 2001 The Washington Post Company
         



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