Green Victory as Nuclear Waste Shipments are Halted
By Galina Stolyarova
Staff Writer
Environmentalists from the international pressure group Greenpeace are trumpeting their biggest success in years after German-Dutch company URENCO announced on Monday that it is ending the practice of sending spent nuclear fuel to Russia for reprocessing and storage. Radioactive loads on board foreign ships had been arriving at the port of St. Petersburg every month for a decade to be sent by rail to factories in Siberia and the Urals. Environmentalists feared that transporting such loads through the city presented a major threat to public health and environmental security. In 1999, they failed in their attempts to have the importing of spent nuclear fuel from abroad into Russia banned. In December 2000, the State Duma voted overwhelmingly to adopt the practice of importing irradiated fuel from other countries. Supporters of the project then said that the money the business would raise would be used to develop Russia’s nuclear industry, as well as improve its safety record and help clean up contaminated areas. Greenpeace and other pressure groups such as Ecodefence argued that the containers containing the waste were not completely leak-proof and the freight traveled across the country unguarded, while the drivers of the trains that carry the dangerous cargo were left in the dark about the radioactive content of the containers. Russian authorities proved impossible to influence but pressure on the Dutch government was more effective and no more radioactive waste will be sent to Russia from the Netherlands or Germany. Greenpeace volunteers from across Europe have been campaigning against this practice since the mid-1990s, when the Russian government inked its first contracts with a string of foreign companies to receive uranium hexafluoride and other radioactive material for reprocessing and storage. “Those contracts were extremely profitable and beneficial for the foreign companies, and humiliating for Russia as it allowed foreign states to easily dispose of nuclear waste, which is extremely expensive to process and store,” explained Vladimir Chuprov, head of Greenpeace’s energy program in Russia. “At the same time, the Russian Atomic Agency was buying up the nukes at 0.6 cents per kilo, which is equivalent to the price of toilet paper. The market value of uranium hexafluoride was at the time around $200.” Worse, most of the spent nuclear fuel that has been arriving in Russia for reprocessing was meant to be stored in the country as well. As a result of such deals, Russia has now accumulated around 120,000 tons of uranium hexafluoride, in addition to 700,000 tons of uranium that the country had already kept in storage. German environmentalists say it cost German companies three times less to send irradiated leftovers to Russia than to reprocess them at home, and blame their home country for being immoral. The practice of sending waste to other countries is unethical, they say, as every country that decides to use nuclear technologies has to be responsible for any costs and consequences involved. Burdening other countries with it and choosing one state as the world’s nuclear dumping ground, however difficult the circumstances of the state may be, is despicable, ecologists insist. URENCO was not the only supplier of spent nuclear fuel to Russia. French company EURODIF continues to send regular shipments with uranium hexafluoride. Russia’s contract with EURODIF expires in 2014, and Greenpeace is actively campaigning in the country. In 2008, Russia also signed contracts with India, Pakistan and China to receive spent nuclear fuel and highly toxic uranium hexafluoride in addition to the regular shipments of radioactive cargoes from Western Europe. “Our organization has recently organized a film screening of our new documentary devoted to this issue,” said Maria Musatova of Greenpeace. “The screening had the effect of a major explosion, and the French authorities have created a special commission aimed at investigating all the circumstances of the deal, including transparency and safety levels.” Russian officials claim nuclear transportation is safe but the rosy picture drawn by the authorities clashes dramatically with reports by environmentalists. In July 2006, members of the local branch of Greenpeace said they measured unsafe levels of radioactivity originating from six containers loaded on trains at Kapitolovo station on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Radioactive shipments always transit through this station, but the wagons were unguarded. “This kind of transport would make a perfect gift for terrorists, both in the sense of accessibility to radioactive material and as a very vulnerable potential object for attack,” Dmitry Artamonov, head of the local Greenpeace branch, said at the time. Two months earlier, members of the group found 37 rail containers marked “radioactive material” sitting on the tracks at Kapitolovo.
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