ENVIRONMENT-BULGARIA: Nuclear Waste Shipments Arouse Moldovan Ire

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Brian Kenety

SOFIA, Sep 16 1998 (IPS) - A Bulgarian shipment of spent nuclear fuel scheduled for dispatch to a Russian reprocessing plant has found its way barred by a political wrangle over the environmental risk to neighbouring Moldova, one of four countries on the rail route.

Bulgarian media announced the shipment on the same day that Moldovan president Petru Lucinschi arrived in Sofia on Tuesday for his first official visit to the country.

But behind the scenes the last minute disputes were continuing, and the spent fuel rods — part of a growing stock now filling storage space at Bulgaria’s troubled Kozloduy nuclear plant — stayed put.

Bulgarian and Moldovan officials were spending Wednesday trying to sort the problem out. A three-day meeting has been scheduled for the weekend.

The terms of the shipment deal, agreed between Bulgaria, Russia, Moldova and Ukraine, include U.N. nuclear safety rules, but the Moldovan government has been split by the row over the transports.

Ever since they were announced last month, the shipments have faced Moldovan opposition, objections by environmentalists and the ire of separatists in eastern Moldova’s breakaway Dniestr region. Critics fear the spent fuel will be followed by more dangerous waste, more difficult to ship and more at risk of accident.

As a result the Moldovan parliament has not yet ratified the four- party pact. Thus the plant was told not to ship the spent fuel.

It had been scheduled to leave Tuesday, by rail through Bulgaria and via special barge along the River Danube, then by rail again through Moldova and Ukraine, before ending up at Russia’s nuclear centre at Sarov, formerly the secret ‘nuclear city’ Arzamas-16.

Georgi Kashchiev, head of Bulgaria’s Committee for the Peaceful Use Of Nuclear Energy, said the weekend meeting would discuss their contingency plans in case of emergency again, but said that it was up to Moldova.

The quadrilateral agreement has been approved by their government, but said he didn’t know what would happen if the Moldovan parliament didn’t ratify it. “It (the shipment) must go by the end of September, that is the deadline (under the agreement).

Until 1990, spent fuel from the Kozloduy plant was sent to the former Soviet Union for reprocessing or storage under a bilateral agreement. But with the expiration of the agreement, spent fuel had to be stored on site and the on-site storage facility is now full, forcing the plant to rely on a temporary storage pool.

In March 1995, Russia agreed to restart reprocessing under a barter arrangement. Shipments, however, have been sporadic and the spent fuel is still building up at Kozloduy. It also has to handle non-fuel nuclear wastes — everything from irradiated construction materials and clothing to coolant pool water.

Though the government agrees that shipment of this non-fuel waste is barred by all involved, Moldovan critics suspect a potentially dangerous and illegal shipment deal is on the cards.

“Besides the used fuel Moldova will have its territory crossed by other sorts of waste,” Moldovan nuclear security engineer Nicolae Budevici told the Chisinau news agency Flux. “Contaminated metal, wood and other materials that used to be in contact with the water of nuclear reactors.”

He warned of “threats of leakage” and if it happens, “the hot spots will be hard to neutralise”. He said that though Moldova had been asked to send experts to supervise the loading, he believed the country lacked suitably qualified engineers.

And Alecu Renita, chairman of the Moldovan parliament’s Ecological Sub-Committee, says that pressure is being applied to relax the law to allow shipment of waste as well as spent fuel. He said the Bulgarian ambassador has already asked his sub-committee to amend the law so as to allow for its transportation.

But Deputy Premier Nicolae Andronic says Kozloduy is located only 500 kilometres from the border and its waste problems are Moldova’s as well. “The problem is being politically manipulated by certain forces who want to score political points,” he adds.

The decision has split the Moldovan establishment. Deputy Prime Minister Valentin Dolganiuc and parliament deputy chairman Iurie Rosca both voted against the shipments. Rosca told Radio Chisinau that “such deals always involve huge sums of dirty money”.

Bulgaria has agreed to pay Moldova 50,000 dollars in transit fees and five million dollars in compensation in the event of an accident while the loads are in transit.

Moldovan environmentalists say Moldova has the highest rate of cancer of all former Soviet bloc countries. The country’s Ecologist Movement at one point threatened a blockade of the railway at the border, according to Ioan Bobina, the director of the movement’s information centre.

But Moldovan Prime Minister Ioan Ciubuc countered that railway blockades will not be permitted because they would “damage Moldova’s international image”.

Another threat comes from the breakaway Dniestr Republic, which covers a thin belt of Moldovan land between the River Dniestr and the Ukrainian border. Head of the Civil Defence Service of the breakaway republic, Valeri Kireev, also warned that Dniestr residents are ready to block the railway and block the shipment.

A 1995 report by the U.S. Department of Energy, placed the oldest VVER 440/230 units at Kozloduy, the first of which began operating in 1974, as one of three Soviet-era plants with “abnormally high accident likelihood”.

Under European Union pressure, in 1995 Bulgaria agreed to shut down units 1 and 2 by 1997, and units 3 and 4 by end 1998. They are still open, despite the EU’s complaints. Kozloduy supplies nearly 46 percent of the electricity produced by NEK and is central to a 150 million dollar contract to supply Turkey with electricity in 1999.

Bulgaria has instead proffered a longer term plan which will include the decommissioning of units 1 and 2 by 2005 and units 3 and 4 between 2008 and 2012, Bulgarian Energy Committee Chairman Ivan Shilyashki told a news conference last week.

Shiliashki maintains that there is no storage crisis at Kozloduy. The spent fuel shipped to Russia will not be returned as processed fuel for 30 years, and will be stored in Russia until after 2020, by when Bulgaria aims to have built a high-radioactive waste storage facility to service the entire region.