UPDATE: Environmentalists detained by police in anti-radwaste protest in St. Petersburg
- Protestors turn out with to demand that the government scrap its plans to build nuke plant in Nizhny Novgorod
- Bellona environmentalists await French uranium tails shipment with protests and monitoring
- Forum on nuclear industry cooperation exposed as bogus by environmental protesters
- Activists turn out to see off ‘mobile Chernobyl’ train load of German radwaste as it heads for the Urals
- Activists from Bellona and Ecodefence arrested – again – for protesting German radwaste shipments
- St. Petersburg receives its monthly radioactive waste shipment from Germany
- Three arrested in Moscow protest against prolonging operations for aged reactors
- Radioactive waste train still in St. Petersburg – protesters threatened at gunpoint
- Offloading of radioactive waste shipment underway in St. Petersburg – with some suspicious American arrivals
- Another radioactive waste ship on the approach to St. Petersburg
- Two Bellona activists detained near St. Petersburg while taking radiation readings on waste
- Russian environmental activists to greet German nuclear waste ship
- Russia ready to accept Latvian nuke waste in early 2008
Related articles
- The Bellona Foundation
Organization
The protest, held in front of St Petersburg’s legislative assembly building, was organised by members of Bellona, Ecodefence!, and an array of other protestors who came to the scene bearing a paper mache ship.
Within minutes they had also unfurled a banner reading in both English and Russian ”Stop Nuclear Transport!”
The protestors were released several hours later from the Admiralteisky Regional police station around 7:00pm, and charged with administrative violations, brought because the protest - despite several advance requests by protestors to authorities - was unsanctioned.
“The actions of the bureaucrats, who baseslessly forbade the protest, and the police, who used physical force against peaceful demonstrators, was directed at in intimidating the activists and preventing future protests against the import of nuclear waste," Ecodefence! co-chairman Vladimir Slivyak, on of the detained demonstrators, told Bellona Web.
Alimov, Editor of Bellona Web’s Russian-language pages who was detained with Slivyak and seven others, agreed.
“We consider the dangers of importing nuclear waste into Russia to be too high to remain silent about it,” he said after his release Thursday evening. Alimov said all arrested participants had their mug shots taken by Sergei Nabokin of the St. Petersburg police UBOP, or anti-organised crime division.
Appeal passed by protestors to the Legislative Assembly
The protestors managed to pass an appeal to stop the import of nuclear waste through St. Petersburg to the city’s legislative assembly prior to arrest.
 |
| Uranium tailings protest in St Petersburg. |
| Alexey Snigirev/Bellona |
Yury Vdovin of the St. Petersburg-based human rights watch-dog group Citizens’ Watch brought the document to the assembly. It was signed by members of numerous environmental and political organisations, including Bellona, Ecodefence!, Greenpeace Russia, Green World, Citizens’ Watch and members of the opposition political party Yabloko.
“As nuclear experts (BNFL and A. Price in 1978) confirm, a leak form as little as one container (containing radioactive waste) is enough to present a serious threat to people within a 32 kilometre radius (of the spill). Railroad accidents are no rarity in Russia,” read the appeal submitted by the protestors.
“We propose that the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg form a special commission comprised of deputies and members of ecological organisations, who, prior to the cessation of imports of toxic and radioactive waste into Russia could take measurements of background radiation close to the imported containers,” the appeal said.
Dumped uranium hexaflouride - uranium tails - are a by-product of uranium enrichment that arises during fuel production for nuclear power plants.
In Russian and abroad, several million tons of uranium tails have piled up, and plans for their disposition in the short term are lacking. According to the Russian “Law on the use of atomic energy” of November 21, 1995, No. 170, f-3, radioactive waste is radioactive materials and radioactive substances whose further use no provisions have been made.
 |
| Polioce descend on peaceful protestors in front of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. |
| Aleksei Snegirev |
By Russian legislation, the import of pure radioactive waste – for which there are no future plans such as reprocessing – is illegal.
Nevertheless, contracts between the Russian feferal atomic energy agency Rosatom and the German-British-Dutch Urenco consortium, contracts with France’s Eurdif and others, this pure waste in the form of uranium tails are imported to Russia.
This waste is delivered to the Port of St. Petersburg and sent from there by rail to Seversk, Angarsk, Zelenogorsk or Novouralsk, all in Siberia.
In accordance with the Urenco contract with Teksnabexport (Tenex), Russia’s state corporation nuclear fuel export monopoly, a part of the imported tails are re-enriched, leaving Russia with 90 percent of the waste. The re-enriched 10 percent are sent back. However, according to the estimates of several Western European experts, somewhere closer to 100 percent of the tails remain in Russia.
Over the last 10 years, thanks to the re-enrichment carried out by Russia, some 560- to 720 tons of new radioactive waste resulting from the re-enrichment of the waste sent by Urenco has accumulated.
Furthermore, the cost of storing this radioactive waste in different countries varies from $2 to $22 m per thousand tons. If western European companies like Urenco and Eurodif were forced to store this waste at home, then their production costs would rise by approximately five times.
The current contract between Rosatom and Urenco runs out in 2009 and the contract with Eurodif runs out in 2014. Russia is the only country in the world that takes imports depleted uranium hexafluoride from other countries.
1/6
|
|
| Protest against import of uranium tailings to Russia in St Petersburg (Alexey Snigirev / Bellona) |
In 2003, Russian Parliamentarian Sergei Mitrokhin filed an inquiry with Rosatom about the contracts facilitating the uranium tail imports. Then Rosatom head revealed some information about the contracts.
In recent months, Bellona Web has send analogous requests to RosTekhNadzor, the Russia Federal Service for ecological, technical and atomic oversight – that organ responsible for regulating safety in the nuclear industry. But no answers have been forthcoming and Bellona Web lawyers are considering turning to the courts to have the information released.
Over the last six months, environmental protests against nuclear transport have taken place in the Russian cities of Yekatrinburg and Tomsk in Siberia, as well as in The Netherlands and Germany. In October 2006, Bellona and Ecodefence! conducted similar protests in front of the German Embassy in Moscow.
At present, the greens of The Netherlands have initiated a suit against the Dutch Government with the aim of cancelling its licence to deliver uranium tails to Russia.
