Former Soviet Union RTGs

[Susan L Gawarecki <loc@ICX.NET>]

An interesting article from this morning's Washington Post follows

below.



I know there was a great deal of interest in the radiation sickness of

the workers in Tokaimura, but there seems to be little discussion on

this list about the condition of the Georgian woodcutters.  Is this due

to a lack of available information or because the different type of

exposure is of less interest?



Overall, the problem of the FSU RTGs seems to be one that the US should

put some resources into resolving.  I'm fully in favor of foreign aid

that helps ensure our security as well as providing significant benefit

to the recipient countries.



Regards,

Susan Gawarecki



Makings of a 'Dirty Bomb'

Radioactive Devices Left by Soviets Could Attract Terrorists

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42294-2002Mar17.html



By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, March 18, 2002; Page A01



Six months ago, they were mere Cold War trash: hundreds of small

radioactive power generators scattered across the Soviet Union decades

ago and largely

forgotten, except when the odd lumberjack turned up with severe

radiation burns.



But in the aftermath of Sept. 11, these aging but potentially lethal

devices are being viewed in a troubling new light: as possible

components in a weapon to be

used in a terrorist strike. Even more troubling, some of them have

vanished.



In Georgia, on the Black Sea, a search is underway for at least two of

the devices, called radiothermal generators, or RTGs, believed to have

been abandoned

and then stolen after the closing of a Soviet military base. Just before

Christmas, three woodcutters in northwestern Georgia suffered massive

injuries after

stumbling upon a similar device in the middle of a forest.



In the far-eastern Russian region of Chukotka, investigators discovered

a complete breakdown in controls over 85 radiothermal generators placed

along the

arctic coast by the Soviets in the 1960s and '70s. Some of the machines

had been vandalized for scrap metal, others were literally falling into

the surf and at

least one could not be found, according to Russian government documents

obtained by The Washington Post.



"The generators are placed on open land, are clearly visible from the

sea and are visited by staff no more than once a year (in recent years,

staff has not visited

the sites at all)," said a report by a Russian commission that inspected

the generators in 1997. "They would be easy targets for a terrorist

attack, the

consequences of which could be extremely serious."



Vladimir Yetylin, a legislator from Chukotka, located on the Bering Sea,

said in an interview Friday that he suspected some generators were still

missing and

planned to press for an investigation.



"At the time, there was not enough money to gather up these [power]

sources," said Yetylin, a member of the lower house of the Russian

parliament, the State

Duma, blaming the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union

in 1991.



The RTGs, used by the Soviets to power navigational beacons and

communications equipment in remote areas, each contain up to 40,000

curies of highly

radioactive strontium or cesium. Even a tiny fraction of a single curie

of strontium has a high probability of causing a fatal cancer, according

to a calculation by

the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), a nuclear

watchdog group. While cesium and strontium cannot be used to make

nuclear weapons,

the two heavy metals could contaminate large areas if combined with

conventional explosives in a radiological weapon or "dirty bomb."



"This stuff can be just ghastly to clean up," said Federation of

American Scientists President Henry Kelly, a physicist who testified

this month at a Senate

hearing on dirty bombs. Such a bomb detonated in a large city could

render several blocks uninhabitable, he added.



There are literally hundreds of places where terrorists could obtain

material for such a bomb, including former dumping grounds for medical

waste in this

country. But the recent discoveries in the former Soviet Union have

further heightened international concerns about the possibility of

nuclear theft. The RTGs in

particular offer high concentrations of radioactivity with minimal

controls -- and sometimes no controls, according to officials of the

International Atomic Energy

Agency (IAEA), the nuclear watchdog of the United Nations.



"After the Soviet Union broke up so abruptly, the newly formed nations

had no use for these things and no infrastructure," said Melissa

Fleming, an IAEA

spokeswoman in Vienna. "They didn't have the means or even the

information to locate, recover and dispose of them."



The IAEA classifies the Soviet RTGs as "orphaned" nuclear sources and

has called for a major international effort to find them and lock them

up. "They are a

problem, from the point of view of terrorism," Fleming said. But she

added: "Since we can't find them, presumably it would be hard for

terrorists to find them as

well."



RTGs are self-contained power sources that convert radioactive energy

into electricity. Compact and relatively small -- Soviet models are

between two and

four feet in length and weigh between 1,000 and 3,000 pounds -- they are

ideal for remote areas with little access to traditional fuels. The

Soviets are known to

have built more than 300 of the devices, most of them to power

navigational beacons along arctic shipping lanes.



The U.S. government also built RTGs; some were used to power spacecraft,

but at least 10 of the devices were installed at remote military

listening posts in

Alaska in the 1960s and '70s. After a brush fire threatened one of the

devices in 1992, the Air Force began replacing them with diesel-powered

generators.



In Soviet-made RTGs, the device's core typically is a flashlight-size

capsule of strontium 90, surrounded by thick lead to absorb the

radiation. When the lead

cladding is intact, the generator is essentially harmless. But if the

shielding were missing or cracked, someone standing nearby would receive

a fatal dose of

radiation within hours, IAEA officials said.



It was the strontium core that the Georgian woodcutters discovered in

December while working in a remote forest in the northwestern region of

Abkhazia.

According to IAEA officials, the metal cylinder caught the men's

attention because its heat had melted the surrounding snow. Oblivious to

the risk, the men

took the device back to their campsite.



Within hours the men suffered severe skin burns and internal organ

damage. Nearly three months later, two of them are still critically ill

in hospitals in Moscow

and Paris, while the third has recovered.



Last month, an international team led by the IAEA recovered the

strontium core and a sister device that had been abandoned in the same

area. Even though

special one-ton lead shields were constructed for the recovery effort,

the workers were allowed to approach the cores for only 40 seconds at a

time. The

cores were trucked to the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, where they are

being temporarily stored along with four others that have been recovered

since 1998.



Still far from clear, the IAEA says, is how the cores ended up in the

woods -- or how the Georgian government eventually will dispose of them.

According to

the IAEA, Georgian officials are convinced that more remain unaccounted

for.



"Based on inventories, we think there are two more," Fleming said. "And

there is some information that suggests still other sources in Georgia."



In other corners of the former Soviet Union, the fact that officials

know the location of the devices has done little to ease local safety

concerns.



The Russian government commission that visited Chukotka in 1997 set out

in ships to inspect 85 radiothermal generators believed to be scattered

along the

region's northern coast. The officials were unable to reach about a

third of the devices because of harsh terrain and bad weather. But of

the 52 RTGs

inspected, nearly half no longer functioned, and only three had any sort

of fencing or protection.



The commission's report describes six of the devices as heavily damaged

and leaking potentially lethal amounts of radiation. One of the

generators was nearly

buried in frozen mud, it said, a second was lying in water and at least

one could not be located.



"This lack of control means that it is entirely within the realm of

possibility that . . . one or several RTGs might have been lost," said

the report, signed by the

province's chief health inspector, G.B. Lebedev, and chief inspector,

Yuri Skobelev.



The generators had long sparked concern among local health officials and

international wildlife groups worried about the potential for radiation

leaks. But even

before the Sept. 11 attacks, environmentalists who visited the region

expressed concern about the apparent lack of security for the devices.



"It was just sitting in a wooden hutch -- I could have walked right up

to it," said David Kleine, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Alaska

field office, who

passed within a few yards of one of the generators during a 1991 Bering

Sea trip.



Still, there is an enormous difference between finding an abandoned

generator and successfully carting it away to create a weapon, nuclear

experts say. IEER

President Arjun Makhijani said an amateur tampering with such a device

would put his own life in peril. But for someone with proper training

and a bent for

terror, the generators could be a means for inflicting significant harm.



"If you don't know what you are doing, it will kill you first,"

Makhijani said. "But if you know what you're doing, it will do an

extreme amount of damage."



Staff writer Alan Cooperman contributed to this report.



© 2002 The Washington Post Company



--

.....................................................

Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director

Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee

We've moved!  Please note our new address:

102 Robertsville Road, Suite B, Oak Ridge, TN 37830

.....................................................





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