KAZAKHSTAN: Nuclear Bomb Too Dangerous To Dig Up, Will Be Blown Up

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrei Ivanov

MOSCOW, Jun 1 1995 (IPS) - Some time before Jun. 12 a 10 kiloton nuclear bomb is to be blown up 130 metres under the south western Degelen mountains in Kazakhstan at the former Soviet nuclear testing ground of Semipalatinsk.

The device, which contains around a kilogramme of plutonium was put in place ready for testing at the Gallery 108-K site in May 1991 just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The purpose of the test was reportedly to study the effects of radiation on instruments and military hardware.

However in August 1991 Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev issued a decree closing the test site permanently.

As reports of ill health, cancers and birth defects at the site increased, so did pressure to close the site, led by mass protests and demonstrations organised by the international NGO, the Nevada- Semipalatinsk Movement.

Semipalatinsk, the USSR’s main testing ground for over 40 years, has seen more nuclear tests than any other test site in the world. Between 1949 when they began and 1991 470 tests took place including 116 in the atmosphere before these were stopped in 1963.

“The first bomb affected half a million people,” says Olzhas Suleimanov, Kazakhstan’s national poet and head of the Nevada- Semipalatinsk environmental movement.

“No safety precautions were taken and no-one could foresee the consequences. Heavily populated areas were affected by that blast but the people did not know about it.” The Kazakh government is now looking at the scale of the damage to health and research has begun at many institutes and research centres.

But most of the data is still held by the Russian Ministry of Defence which inherited it from the Soviet authorities and Kazakh scientists are trying to get access to that information.”

The condition of the device in Gallery 108-K was not known and a joint Kazakh-Russian commission was established in 1992 to decide how to deal with it. They decided that if the bomb had deteriorated it would have to be destroyed where it sat by chemical explosives.

The bomb — developed by Boris Litvinov, Chief Designer at the All-Russia Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics at the Russian ‘secret city’ of Snezhinsk, formerly known as Chelyabinsk-70 — is situated 525 metres from the gallery entrance.

Last year work began to open the gallery, which had been sealed up in preparation for the test. Engineers cleared the way to 80 metres from the bomb and then ran a 130-metre-long bypass at a distance of 30 metres from the main shaft.

The Degelen small enterprise was hired to carve out this bypass at a cost of 855 million roubles (155,500 dollars). Russia sent technical equipment to the city of Kurchatov last August when dismantling of the gallery entrance began.

When the experts finally gained access to the end compartment earlier this year they found that device could not be safely moved without risk of detonation, as considerable corrosion had already taken place.

So far around 400 kilogrammes of explosives have been laid at the end of the tunnel and destruction will take place when conditions are suitable. No release of radiation into the environment is expected to occur.

Suleimanov believes that 90 percent of the health problems in Kazakhstan are caused or complicated by radioactive contamination. But identifying the precise causes and the types of radiation involved is difficult.

“It is a slow process. The effect of radiation due to testing is often confused by other causes,” he points out.

Aside from the lingering fallout from the tests there is a long list of other likely sources. Kazakhstan’s nuclear waste problem is not fully recognised and many wastes have not yet been identified. Kazakhstan also has its own nuclear industry — 40 percent of the USSR’s uranium was produced here, largely without care for proper safety precautions.

There are also medical and industrial wastes which have just been dumped at unknown sites. In addition there are many areas where nuclear explosions were conducted for industrial purposes such as excavation or seismic monitoring.

In 1992 the government adopted a scheme to compensate victims of Semipalatinsk testing but it proved inadequate, and did not cover areas in the west of the country where the industrial nuclear testing was carried out, said Suleimanov.

According to the Kazakh health ministry the health effects of nuclear testing are considerable. The incidence of diseases in the Semipalatinsk area is six times greater than in the republic in general. Blood diseases are 1.7 times more frequent and skin diseases twice as common.

Infant mortality in the region is more than 33 per 1,000 births — almost a third more than in the country as a whole and it is highest in the areas nearer to the testing site.

Medical expeditions from the National Academy of Sciences and the Health Ministry have identified a complex of many diseases which are 10 times more common than in those areas.

Semipalatinsk is now to become a centre for peaceful scientific research and the government is considering using some of the galleries used for underground testing as stores for waste materials.

Radioactive land is to be cleaned up as far as possible and nearby populated areas have been declared zones of ecological disaster.

Nazarbayev said in a televised address to the nation last week that Kazakhstan was now about to start a new phase in its history. “The health of half a million residents of Kazakhstan exposed to radiation have been sacrificed to the senseless nuclear arms race,” he said.

“In a few days the nuclear history of our state will be ended. From now on the people of Kazakhstan will no longer have to fear the nuclear genie which was always threatening to break free.”