Bellona activists prevented from taking rad measurements of German waste, but surprisingly allowed to keep photos
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Import of uranium tailings
Activists unfurl a banner reading “They brought German radioactive waste to St. Petersburg.”
Rashid Alimov/Bellona
- Protestors turn out with to demand that the government scrap its plans to build nuke plant in Nizhny Novgorod
- Uranium tail imports to Russia violate international principles and agreements
- No more nuclear waste imports, nuke icebreakers to go to Rosatom, says Kiriyenko in surprise announcements
- French ship arrives in St. Petersburg carrying more European uranium tails for waste storage in Russia
- Bellona environmentalists await French uranium tails shipment with protests and monitoring
- Activists from Bellona and Ecodefence arrested – again – for protesting German radwaste shipments
- St. Petersburg receives its monthly radioactive waste shipment from Germany
- Radioactive waste train still in St. Petersburg – protesters threatened at gunpoint
- Two Bellona activists detained near St. Petersburg while taking radiation readings on waste
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The activists were unable to get accurate radiation levels close to the containers of waste that were by yesterday waiting in a railway switching yard in St. Petersburg’s populous Avtovo region, as they were taken to a local police precinct.
But in what is a welcome departure from procedure, the activist were allowed by authorities to keep the photographs they had taken of the train laden with German depleted uranium hexafluoride, or uranium tails, as it wended it’s way through the maze of some of St. Petersburg’s most densely populated southern districts.
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| Dangerous radioactive waste gets pulled by rail through the middle of St. Petersburg, a city of 4.5 million residents. |
| Rashid Alimov/Bellona |
At around 10 p.m. yesterday, Bellona activists approached the load of waste in the switchyard to take Geiger counter measurements of background radiation surrounding the waste containers. On past occasions, Bellona has measured spikes in background radiation as high as 30 Sieverts per hour – three times normal background radiation.
The activists also unfurled banners with slogans protesting nuclear waste imports from Europe to Russia. While taking photographs of the train, the activists were approached by interior ministry captain Sergei Marchenko, who identified himself to the protestors, and several other officers.
The activists were then escorted to a local police precinct where they were detained for about an hour while their equipment and photos were inspected. Police officials recorded the activists’ passport information.
But unlike many earlier attempts by Bellona to document the regular loads of uranium tails arriving from the German-Dutch uranium enrichment joint venture Urenco, which have resulted in arrests – and in once instance, threats at gunpoint – the activists where released with their photographs intact. Marchenko deemed that the photographs contained no “secret information” that should be protected by Russia’s fluid and arbitrarily applied laws on State classification.
Marchenko released the activists with the request that they inform district law enforcement the next time they plan to photograph trains of radioactive waste.
“We considered very important that a representative of the interior ministry realised that these photographs present nothing secret and can be publicised,” said Rashid Alimov, editor of Bellona Web’s Russian pages.
“It is important that St. Petersburg’s residents can see that radioactive waste is being brought past residential buildings in the Avtovo region.”
According to studies by the British nuclear firm BNFL, now known as BNG: "It is clear that the sudden release of large quantities of uranium hexafluoride if windborne could conceivably cause large numbers of casualties. In theory, such an occurrence could in certain weather conditions produce lethal concentrations in places 20 miles (32 km) from the point of release."
So far, Russia has accrued some 700,000 tons of foreign depleted uranium hexafluoride.
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| German waste at the Urenco facility in Gronau being prepared for shipment to Russia. |
| Bellona |
The waste train photographed by Bellona’s St. Petersburg office contained 1000 tons of uranium tails sent from Urenco as part of a contract between the company and Russia’s uranium enrichment giant Teksnabexport (Tenex) that Russia receive 100,000 of Urenco’s waste.
The current load arrived in St. Petersburg’s port last week aboard the German freighter Schouwenbank amid mounting protests in St. Petersburg and Germany. The shipments have become more regular as Urenco tries to unload some 20,000 tons remaining on its contract before it expires next year.
The waste has been slated for reprocessing and export back to Germany, but this has happened in only a handful of instances early in the contract. For the most part, the uranium tails remain in Russia, many of which are stored in the open air – something Russia’s own nuclear regulatory body, weak as it is, has stated, “does not correspond to contemporary safety requirements.”
Urenco could store the waste itself, but the storage would drive up it’s own production costs by five times, according to company estimates given to the Russian environmental group Ecodefence.
Sergei Kiriyenko, chief of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom has said Urenco’s contract will not be renewed – something that environmentalists view as an encouraging sign that Russian nuclear officialdom are finally admitting that the material is only landing in Russia for storage.
Yet, it remains unclear whether Russia regards the material as waste or raw material for reprocessing. Most European countries do not, but the United States does. Russia at present seems to be sitting on the fence.
So far the imports have slid past Russian legislation banning imports of pure nuclear waste under the designation that the loads of uranium tails are raw material for reprocessing.
But another company, Eurodif – a subsidiary of France’s Areva – has a contract to continue importing uranium tails to Russia until 2014, and Kiriyenko has so far remained mum about the disposition of this agreement.
Environmentalists say that for Kiriyeko’s statements of last week – when he promised to not renew Urenco’s waste import contract – to have any biting teeth he should cancel France’s imports as well.
It is believed that the waste train currently parked in Avtovo will be heading to Novouralsk, near Yekatrinburg, where the Urenco waste has been gathering since 2003, German environmentalists and Russian nuclear industry authorities have said. Other shipments from the German and French contracts have been sent to Angarsk, near Irkutsk, Seversk, near Tomsk, and Zelenogrosk, near Krasnoyarsk.
The disposition of this waste – like most nuclear waste in the world – remains uncertain as no country on the planet has yet developed an effective method for safely storing radioactive waste for more than 50 years, falling several hundred years short of the time such waste reaches its peak toxicity.
Renata Goroshkova contributed reporting from St.Petersburg for this report, and Charles Digges wrote and reported from Oslo.
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