Nuclear waste depository in Russia?

["Tsurikov, Nick" <nick.tsurikov@iluka.com>]

Dear Radsafers,

The following was published today in The St.Petersburg Times
(http://www.sptimes.ru/current/ministry.htm):
>>>>>>>>>>
TOP STORY

Ministry: Give Us Nuclear Garbage
 
By Melissa Akin 
STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW - A former CIA chief and a pair of U.S. admirals are among those
trying to grant Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov his fondest wish: to
make money dumping the world's spent nuclear fuel in Russia.
The Non-Proliferation Trust, Inc., whose members include former director of
U.S. Central Intelligence William Webster and Admirals Dan Murphy and Bruce
DeMars, say a commercial spent fuel dump in Russia could bring in billions
of dollars that would work for the cause of nuclear security.
Some environmentalists are troubled by NPT's plan. They say it poses threats
ranging from nuclear mishaps while the fuel is in transit, to new
proliferation problems, to a new tide of anger at America for using Russia
as a nuclear dump.
"This is like a bad dream," said Lydia Popova, a former nuclear industry
worker who now runs the Center for Nuclear Ecology and Energy Policy, a
Moscow-based research center.
But NPT and its environmentalist opponents agree on one thing: Russia
desperately needs money to keep nuclear materials safe and to clean up the
radioactive pollution left by more than 50 years of nuclear power generation
and nuclear weapons production. There are U.S.-Russian joint government
projects addressing that problem, but they have been criticized as moving at
a glacial pace.
Enter the NPT: They would build and operate a temporary storage facility for
the world's spent fuel and donate the profits to Russia over the next 40
years. In the meantime, specialists would look for a suitably remote
location on Russian territory to bury thousands of metric tons of waste
permanently.
The Minatom Development Trust, a spin-off of NPT, would administer part of
the projected $11 billion in profits. A tenth of the total income would pay
to buy security-improvement measures for excess weapons plutonium and
uranium, removed from nuclear warheads under the START I disarmament treaty.
The project faces a big hitch, however: A Russian law banning the import of
nuclear waste, one that Adamov's Nuclear Power Ministry, or Minatom, has
been lobbying heavily to gut.
At a gathering of nuclear industry workers in Obninsk last month, Adamov
said his ministry could net $50 billion in foreign contracts to reprocess
spent reactor fuel if it weren't for the Law on Environmental Protection.
"To get money for the reprocessing and dumping of spent fuel is better than
borrowing money from the IMF," Adamov said, according to Itar-Tass. He added
that Minatom alone could match the $4.5 billion the International Monetary
Fund is offering Russia in new loans if it could reprocess foreign fuel.
Companies in Britain and France reprocess waste from other nations, but they
send the waste back to the country of origin. Adamov believes Russia could
get a competitive edge in this business by offering cheaper reprocessing and
then letting the customer pay to leave the waste in Russia.
Among other things, however, reprocessing yields plutonium which some
scientists believe might be suitable for use in crude nuclear bombs.
Efforts to expand Russia's reprocessing industry have not gotten far. There
is now one reprocessing plant in Chelyabinsk, but a second one planned to be
built in Krasnoyarsk has been held up by environmental opposition and
funding problems.
And the idea of Russia jump-starting its reprocessing industry and
generating massive new amounts of plutonium troubles some - including the
NPT itself, which wants Russia to confine itself to accepting waste from
other nations processed elsewhere.
"It is very important to us that our project NOT be cast in terms of
Minatom's long-term plans, but that it be viewed for what it is - a
specific, limited proposal that does not involve reprocessing now or ever,"
said John Kyte, an NPT spokesman with the Burson-Mar steller public
relations company.
Minatom, however, sees it differently. "Of course there is a desire" to
reprocess the fuel NPT would import, said Minatom spokesman Yury Bespalko.
"It would make the whole project more profitable."
Adamov is scheduled to meet with NPT representatives in Washington this week
on the sidelines of Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin's visit.
But despite NPT statements that a memorandum on mutual consultations has
been signed, Bespalko said Friday no agreements would be signed until it
becomes legal to import spent fuel into Russia.
To sweeten the deal for the parliament and the Russian public, NPT offered
$2 billion for "distressed Russian citizens" such as orphans and pensioners.
Some of the profits would go to other public-interest causes, namely,
cleanup of rivers, lakes and soil used as nuclear waste dumps around the
plutonium and uranium production facilities.
The project's proponents say the radiation risks are minor compared to the
economic benefits. They also say that the volumes of fuel are minor compared
to the amount Russia is dealing with now.
"Russia is already a shithole," said a source close to the project who asked
to remain unidentified in an interview last Tuesday. "If you add this 10 to
15 thousand tons of fuel it's like a speck of dust at the Bolshoi in
volume."
The project is "very pro-Russian economy," said Kyte of Burson-Marsteller.
Minatom is also anxious to get its hands on German dry storage technology
that NPT is offering. Dry storage of spent fuel in metal casks is superior
to the wet storage technologies in use at crowded waste facilities across
Russia now housing 14,000 tons of spent fuel, Bespalko said.
But neither charity sweeteners nor the promise of new green technologies
have eroded opposition to the idea.
"Not even for U.S. dollars," said Vladimir Mikheyev of the Green World
movement in Krasnoyarsk, an activist group battling the Krasnoyarsk-26
nuclear weapons production facility nearby. That site, like its sister
sites, Chelyabinsk-65 and Tomsk-7, has been tipped to host an NPT storage
facility.
Nuclear experts interviewed said they thought the U.S. departments of state
and energy generally approved of the NPT scheme. The departments are
limited, however, by the lack of a cooperation treaty with Russia, which
experts said would be necessary for something as weighty as shipping nuclear
materials there.
Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert with Harvard University's Kennedy School of
Government, said NPT's plan was not the first time someone had proposed an
international dump site. Bunn cited proposals to store foreign spent reactor
fuel in Australia and on Wake Island in the south Pacific - the latter plan
the brainchild of businessman Alex Copson, who also helped draw up the NPT
deal.
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Kind regards
-----
Nick Tsurikov
Eneabba, Western Australia
e-mail: nick.tsurikov@iluka.com
World Collection of Radiation Links:
http://www.westnet.net.au/Walkabout/
-----


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