RUSSIA-ENVIRONMENT: Nuclear Waste Imports ‘Illegal’ Again

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrei Ivanov

MOSCOW, Apr 11 1996 (IPS) - Greenpeace Russia is claiming a “major victory” after Russia’s Supreme Court overturned a presidential decree issued last year which allows foreign nuclear materials to be imported.

This week’s decision could delay even further completion of the nuclear reprocessing plant RT-2 in Zheleznogorsk, formerly the ‘closed city’ of Krasnoyarsk-26.

The Ministry of Nuclear Energy (MinAtom) needs to find an additional four billion dollars to complete the plant and had hoped to get it in credits from foreign countries that intended to store spent fuel in Russia pending processing.

The Supreme Court ruled that it would be possible to import foreign spent nuclear fuel into Russia only if a relevant international agreements are signed and have the approval of environmental experts.

“The court has placed an enormous sign reading ‘RIP’ on MinAtom’s plans to start breaking the law,” says Ivan Blokov of Greenpeace Russia.

Deputy Minister Nikolai Yegorov said that RT-2 would still be completed but admitted that financing the project would be difficult without foreign contracts. The court had refused to order an end to the financing of the plant.

The Presidential decree in question — No 72 On State Support for the Reconstruction and Conversion of Nuclear Energy in the City of Zheleznogorsk — was signed in January 1995 and court action began the following April.

This is part of a wider, long-running dispute between Russia’s nuclear industry and environmentalists led by Greenpeace. At the end of last year Russian president Boris Yeltsin vetoed a new law on radioactive waste which had been passed by both chambers of the Russian parliament.

The law banned waste imports and explicitly defined spent fuel as a ‘waste’, closing a loophole in the existing environmental regulations and directly contradicting the provisions of a new Atomic Energy Law passed and signed by Yeltsin a few weeks before.

The Law formally allows Russia to import nuclear spent fuel for reprocessing, despite environmental legislation already in force which bans the transport of nuclear wastes across Russia’s borders.

MinAtom had managed to get round its provisions by defining spent nuclear fuel as a ‘raw material’. The court ruling essentially reinstated some of the provisions of the vetoed waste law.

“The waste law requires any future import of spent fuel to have international agreement and to be ratified by parliament,” explains a member of Greenpeace Russia, who participated in some of the parliamentary discussions during its drafting.

The new court ruling now explicitly bans the import of any foreign nuclear materials, although importation of spent fuel from Soviet-designed reactors built abroad is still permitted.

Work officially resumed on completing RT-2 almost two years ago but is only proceeding very slowly due to lack of finance. Reprocessing currently takes place only at the RT-1 plant at Mayak in Ozersk (formerly Chelyabinsk-65), which began operating in 1977.

It deals only with wastes from the small Soviet-designed VVER- 440 reactors and from nuclear submarine power plants, RT-2 will be able to reprocess fuel from the bigger VVER-1000 plants which is currently stored on site at nuclear power plants or at Zheleznogorsk in a special facility which is rapidly becoming full.

Without money from reprocessing contracts it is unlikely to be finished by the target date of 2005.

Although talks with Germany and Switzerland have come to nothing, MinAtom has undertaken to supply and reprocess fuel for the reactors Russia is building in Iran and Russia is also offering similar services to China, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Talks are known to have been under way for a long time with South Korea on the provision of reprocessing services, even though South Korea’s reactors are not of Soviet design. The new court ruling will now make any dealings with South Korea illegal.

The law encourages international cooperation in terms of the export and import of waste management technologies and exchange of information about any accidents or radioactivity leaks.

It also details a waste management strategy for dealing with Russia’s own rapidly growing nuclear wastes for which there are as yet not enough storage or processing facilities.

Anatoly Shramchenko, a leading expert on the Duma (parliament) Committee for Ecology which considered the draft law, says practical implementation would in any case have been difficult.

He points out that wastes with a total activity of three billion curies has already accumulated, only half of which is buried in deep geological formations.

The rest is on the surface or dumped in water bodies. Poor waste management has left many plants such as Mayak and Tomsk-7 in Siberia seriously contaminated, he says.

He adds that there are appropriate geological conditions for the construction of storage facilities for high-level wastes on Novaya Zemlya — Russia’s nuclear testing ground in the Arctic. And it may also be possible to build underground final storage facilities for spent fuel near the nuclear power plants where the geology is suitable.

Shramchenko cannot put a figure on the amount needed to implement the waste management programme but says “huge financial resources will be needed”.

Then there is the additional problem of radioactive wastes produced by the military. This includes wastes from the operation of the Russian Navy’s nuclear ships including their decommissioning. Of the budget allocations set aside so far for management of these wastes no more than 15 percent has been paid.