Russian nuclear dumping

["Thomas J Savin " <tjsav@LYCOS.COM>]

Here's an article I came across this morning - Enjoy!



Tom Savin



Radioactive Russian Waters Worry Chelyabinsk Governor



MOSCOW, Russia, August 16, 2001 (ENS) - The governor of Russia's Chelyabinsk region, Petr Sumin, has warned that water in his district is contaminated with radioactivity from the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant. 



The governor's warning, contained in a July 10 letter to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, was disclosed Wednesday by a Moscow based anti-nuclear environmental group. 



The international environmental group EcoDefense! obtained a copy of the letter and made it public out of concern for public health and safety. 



"It is no doubt that such letter must be disclosed because it contains information on serious threat to millions of Russian citizens," said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of EcoDefense! 



Governor Sumin's letter says, "It becomes more and more dangerous to use the Techa River cascade, serving the Mayak facility of Minatom [Ministry of Atomic Energy]. Open water reservoirs contain about 400 million cubic meter of radioactively contaminated water. The level of these waters is about to become dangerous." 





Sofiya Khrolenko, who lived near Mayak during a 1957 nuclear accident, shows a videographer the contaminated Techa River. (Photo courtesy Log In Productions)

The Chelyabinsk governor demanded immediate action to solve the problem of radioactive pollution in the water. 

Mayak, Russia's only nuclear reprocessing plant, has dumped its radioactive waste into Russian rivers over the past 40 years, Slivyak says. 



Governor Sumin suggests that constructing a new nuclear plant is the key to the Mayak problem. He writes, "building of the South-Ural nuclear power plant allows to solve this problem effectively." 



Slivyak calls that plan "disastrous" and "absurd." Instead of working to get rid of 400 million cubic meters of radioactive waste, Slivyak says, "Chelyabinsk authority proposes a plan that will increase the amount of nuclear waste in the region as a result of new nuclear plant operation." 



An estimated 14,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste, such as spent nuclear fuel, has accumulated at Russian nuclear plants. 



Slivyak says the amount of medium and low-level radioactive waste in Russia cannot be calculated across the country because the amount is large and not all of the locations where it is stored are known to the public. 



In May, the Russian government changed a law to open the border for foreign spent nuclear fuel to be stored or reprocessed in Russia. 



Established as an atomic weapons complex in the late 1940s, Mayak is now the only reprocessing facility operating in Russia. It can handle an estimated 400 tons a year, but Slivyak says that during the 1990s, the plant was reprocessing no more than 150 tons of spent nuclear fuel annually. 



According to a source at the plant, it needs modernization that would cost about US$600 million. 





Russian anti-nuclear protesters lie on a street in Chelyabinsk August 3, 2000 (Photos courtesy EcoDefense!)

The Chelyabinsk district, called an oblast, is situated in the southern Urals bordering on Kazakhstan in the south and Bashkortostan in the west. 

A large amount of land near the Mayak facility is still contaminated as a result of a 1957 accident comparable to Chernobyl in its effects. On September 29, 1957, a Mayak tank containing radioactive waste exploded, releasing several millions of Ci of radioactivity into the atmosphere. 



Thousands of people were resettled, thousands of square kilometers were polluted. There is special federal program to rehabilitate this territory in Russian budget, but it is not clear what kind of programs are implemented within its framework. 



"Mayak must be shut down as soon as possible," Slivyak said. "The more it operates, the more plutonium will be generated out of spent fuel reprocessing. Russia doesn't need this plutonium, it already has more than enough, so it's unlikely that this material will ever be properly watched and protected," the anti-nuclear campaigner says. 





 





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Tom Savin





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