Organized by Ecodefense!, the rally attracted activists from Tomsk, Kaliningrad, Murmansk, Saint Petersburg, Omsk, Barnaul, Moscow, Ozersk of the Chelyabinsk region, Yekaterinburg, and Krasnoufimsk.

At 1 p.m., environmentalists spread in front of the local administration building two 40-meter banners saying "Stop nuclear waste import!" and "Must Russia grow tails?" The action’s aim was perceived to attract attention to the problem of nuclear waste import to Russia, particularly to the Siberian Chemical Combine located in the Tomsk region. This facility imports so-called “uranium tails” – waste generated during uranium enrichment – from France and Germany.

One of the banners was fixed on poles at a 10-meter height, while the other was spread below. Several passers-by joined the protesters, telling reporters they supported the environmentalists’ position. The rally carried on for thirty minutes before police broke it up. Tomsk policemen tore one of banners and arrested 12 participants.

Police in Tomsk arrest participants of local rally against the import of so-called “uranium tails”.

Rashid Alimov/Bellona

“Shipping nuclear waste into Siberia is a crime against future generations of Russian people,” said Slivyak at the rally. “In more than 50 years of activity, nuclear industry has not managed to come up with any technologies to ensure safe disposal of radioactive waste, but it is increasing generation of such waste in Russia at an enormous speed, including via radioactive waste imports.”

Midway into this interview, four policemen – who did not present themselves by name or badge – arrested Slivyak and, stating no charge necessitating the arrest, took him away in a police car for “identification purposes.”

At the time of the posting of this report, Slivyak and other arrested participants were still held at Tomsk’s Leninsky police department. They were as yet to be officially charged, and were forbidden access to legal counsel.

Police also tried to arrest Nadezhda Kutepova – an antinuclear activist who came from Ozersk with a 5-year-old son to observe the protest. After interference from passers-by and reporters at the rally, police abandoned their attempts and started to climb up the poles to take down one of the banners.

Tomsk police attempting to take down a banner saying "Stop nuclear waste import!"

Ecodefense!

“In Tomsk, any actions or protests near the regional administration building are banned – with utter violations of the law,” Ecodefense! representative Andrei Ozharovsky told reporters at the rally. “Our action has to be unsanctioned, because the Russian Constitution – the fundamental law of our country – guarantees the freedom of expression, and our goal is to express out point of view to the regional administration.”

During the arrests, the police declined queries by Bellona.Ru about the legality of the law enforcement’s actions. Despite repeated attempts, no telephone calls were answered at the police department where several protesters were taken.

Import of “uranium tails”

Ships loaded with dangerous cargo call at the port of Saint Petersburg, from where these “tails” – officially called uranium hexafluoride – travel by railroad to nuclear plants of Siberia. The Russian Federal Agency for Atomic Energy, or Rosatom, considers uranium tails to be valuable raw material rather than simple waste, though industrial use is limited to a very small number of tails, while 90 percent of the import remains to be stored in Russia.

Russian law forbids nuclear waste import into the country. In June 2006, Bellona and Ecodefense! sent an official complaint to prosecutors, protesting the arrival to St. Petersburg of the vessel Doggersbank carrying 1.000 tons of nuclear waste.

Tomsk police tear a banner out of the protesters’ hands.

Rashid Alimov/Bellona

“We expect the prosecutors not to let our complaint pass unnoticed,” commented Bellona counselor Nina Popravko.

“I can put it straight out like this: I don’t like it when they bring in 1,000 tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride, enrich it to a necessary level, and ship it back, while we have to store almost 90 percent on our territory,” told Bellona.Ru Yury Zubkov, head of the Radioactive Safety Department at the Tomsk Regional Committee for the Protection of the Environment.

“At some point in the future, maybe, uranium prices will go up so high that reprocessing will become profitable – but nobody knows when. Maybe never. Then we’ll have to store it indefinitely.”

He added: “Furthermore, nobody – not just us, but the residents and environmentalists as well – likes any better that all these dangerous materials get transported right through the residential areas of Tomsk.”

Railroad entrance to Seversk, a closed town near Tomsk: Nuclear waste passes here to arrive at the Siberian Chemical Combine.

Rashid Alimov/Bellona

Earlier, Ecodefense! and Tomsk Ecological Student Inspection announced the start of the 7th National Antinuclear Camp to be opened in the vicinity of the Siberian Chemical Combine near the “closed” town of Seversk in the Tomsk region.

The camp, scheduled to run between July 26 and August 3, plans to provide informational services to the local residents and host protest actions. Dozens of representatives of various environmental organizations countrywide – from northwest’s Kaliningrad to Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia – came to participate in the action.

The anti-nuclear tent city spread on the riverside across from the “closed area” of the world’s largest plutonium plant on the other bank. The camp is bordered by a settlement named Sputnik, which houses a research nuclear reactor.

By analysts’ estimations, uranium tails import into Russia has reached a gigantic scale. Nuclear waste is accepted at Seversk (Tomsk region), Angarsk (Irkutsk region), Zelenogorsk (Krasnoyarsk region), and Novouralsk (Sverdlovsk region). In the past 10 years, no less than 100,000 tons of additional nuclear waste has been generated in Russia as a result of so-called “re-enrichment of nuclear tails,” even though Russia earns nothing from this waste’s storage or disposal.

This business is only hinged on Rosatom’s readiness to store the radioactive waste at its own enterprises. At the same time, costs of waste burial in various countries range from $2m to $22m per 1,000 tons. Should the West European companies Urenco and Eurodif dispose of the waste on their own, the price of their product would take a 5-time hike.

This two-headed calf, born in May 2006 in the village of Naumovka, is deemed to be the side-effect of a 1993 radioactive accident at the Siberian Chemical Combine.

Bellona archive

“We have already suffered from the activities of the Siberian Chemical Combine: Several villages are polluted by the radiation from the 1993 accident, but nobody has yet been evacuated,” said during Ecodefense!’ rally Zinaida Kolomoitseva, a resident of the nearby village of Naumovka and an environmental activist. “We must stop the combine’s dangerous activity before people all over Russia find themselves in the same situation.”

Naumovka – just like the neighboring village of Georgiyevka – have felt the impact of the accident at the chemical combine since April 1993. A lawsuit filed by Naumovka residents to the European Court of Human Rights is now being considered in Strasburg. The court has recently sent an official query to the Russian government asking to account for the prolonged period of time it took to examine the case within the Russian court system.

Naumovka residents are litigating through Konstantin Lebedev, a Tomsk attorney who had earlier represented the villagers of Georgiyevka and won on his claim for damages on grounds of the harmful effects of the 1993 accident.

“The Russian trial took a long time, but the court did not take into consideration the scientific evaluations that evidenced the impact of the chemical combine’s activities on the villagers’ health,” Kolomoitseva told Bellona.Ru. “People in Naumovka are deeply depressed. After the birth of the two-headed calf in May, few expect any good coming to the village.”

Valery Konyashkin, an expert with the Tomsk region’s ecological department, commented the situation to Bellona.Ru by saying: “It seems to me that we are in for a serious backlash on the part of the state.”

According to Konyashkin, the nation continues to build the so-called “power vertical” – this moniker, introduced several years ago by Russian President Vladimir Putin, denotes a push for strong centralization of government power accompanied by what critics point out are signs of a sharp turn toward the Soviet-time totalitarian methods.

“Soon, it will become much harder to fight for the public’s ecological interests,” he said.