Ship With Toxic Load Holed
By Galina Stolyarova
Staff Writer
The Captain Lus, a Russian vessel that regularly delivers radioactove cargo to St. Petersburg from abroad for subsequent reprocessing in Siberia, has collided with The Sundstraum, a Norwegian tanker, that was carrying chemicals. The Russian ship was en route from St. Petersburg to the French port of Le Havre. According to the preliminary investigation into the incident, the vessels share responsibility for causing the collision. Rashid Alimov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the international environmental organization Bellona, told The St. Petersburg Times that The Captain Lus, which was holed in the collision, was carrying 9 containers of urainum ore concentrate on board. The cargo totalled 182 tons in weight, but no radioactive leaks were registered. The Captain Lus is currently undergoing repairs in Denmark. After the accident the radioactive cargo was moved to another Russian ship, The Mikhail Lomonosov, which has already delivered the shipment to its final destination, the COMURNEX enterprise which belongs to the Areva holding in Malvesi, France. Every month The Captain Lus or similar vessels deliver uranium hexafluoride or other uranium derivatives to the city. The Russian authorities claim the transportation is safe, while ecologists maintain that the process is very risky. “The Captain Lus incident — which received no coverage in the mainstream media — is a compelling example of the fact that nuclear transportation is not at all immune to accidents,” Alimov said. Russian environmental organizations campaign to end the transportation of nuclear cargoes over the Baltic Sea, arguably the most polluted sea on the planet. “Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency is bragging about what they describe as the high levels of security in nuclear transportation but, as we can see, major accidents still occur,” said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of the Russian environmental group Ecodefense. “Risks of radioactive leaks really are high, and, if such a leak happens, the damage to nature and humanity would be severe,” Slivyak said. “Russian legislation forbids the import of spent nuclear fuel or any nuclear waste, but the authorities evade the law by marking uranium hexafluoride as a raw material,” Alimov explained. “Because neither Russia nor any other country has any idea of what they can possibly do with uranium hexafluoride, which is to say what use they could make of it, the substance clearly qualifies as waste. The world’s storage facilities currently hold several million tons of uranium hexafluoride.” According to Bellona, Russia is the only country in the world that receives uranium hexafluoride from abroad in industrial quantities. Russian officials claim that uranium hexafluoride is as safe as toothpaste, while ecologists regard the compound as a nuclear waste. The environmentalists described “a cloud of secrecy” surrounding nuclear transportation. “We are particularly worried about the fact that Russian environmental groups are constantly denied any opportunity to implement independent control and monitoring of the traffic,” Alimov said. “Despite numerous requests, officials have refused to inform us about emergency or clean-up plans that would be implemented should an accident happen.” The authorities insist that they are in full control of the situation and do not require any help from ecological groups. Government officials also stress that the nuclear industry is crucially important for Russia. The country provides nuclear fuel for every third nuclear reactor in the world. According to nuclear imports advocates, this earns huge amounts for the state budget: nuclear fuel is Russia’s third most profitable export, after the export of oil and gas. Alimov warns, however, that accidents during transportation are still very common in Russia, with trainssometimes colliding, going off the rails and even falling off bridges. “Russia’s transport system is not immune to accidents and if an accident involving radioactive material were to happen in St. Petersburg, the price that the city would pay would be much too high,” Alimov said. “If a transport accident occurs that breaks the hermetic seal of a container which is loaded with spent nuclear fuel, it could result in lethal cases of radiation poisoning within a 32-kilometer radius from the site of the spill,” he said.
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