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The Russian nuclear industry, as represented by Rosatom, has widely promulgated its willingness to run the international centre, which will serve as a world uranium bank, both producing uranium for countries that can’t or don’t want to enrich their own uranium and sell to a tightly monitored client list to avoid proliferation risks like Iran.
The Centre has already received the warm endorsement of the United States Congress and the powerful Washington-based NGO, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which have jointly donated $100 million toward the project. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency is on board as well, and Norway, which itself donated $5 million toward the project, had promised to front efforts to raise the additional $95 million to open the centre.
The building of the centre received another boost with the signing in May of a civilian nuclear pact between the United States and Russia, paving the way for technological exchanges, the import of US-controlled spent nuclear fuel to Russian cooperation on the International Uranium Enrichment Centre.
The pact must pass the approval of the Russian Duma and clear sceptical hurdles in US congress. But it has received a much needed boost from the authors of the 1992 Cooperative Threat Reduction act, Senator Richard Lugar and former Senator Sam Nunn.
But few of the powerbrokers involved in the pact, and more specifically the uranium enrichment centre at Angarsk, have addressed the environmental threats inherent in the industrial scale uranium enrichment process itself, which threatens the population Irkutsk and the precious natural resource of Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake.
The tour of the facility given by the facility to environmentalists – who are thinking about precisely these problems while the concerned governments debate only the political angles – amounted to little more than a Potemkin Village look at what promises to be one of the world’s largest and dirtiest uranium enrichment sights.
Smoke and mirrors
At a Thursday press conference after visiting the Angarsk Electro Chemical Combine (AEKhK in its Russian abbreviation), the specific locale proposed for the enrichment centre, Bellona and the powerful Baikal Environmental Wave announced that the public was being duped.
“Rosatom portrays openness in the framework of its PR campaign on the creation of the International Uranium Enrichment Centre, however there is, in fact, no openness at all,” Rashid Alimov, editor of Bellona Web’s Russian-language pages told the conference.
On Wednesday evening, Bellona environmentalists, who had been invited to the AEKhK by its administration were denied requests to take radiation readings and were not furnished with information they had requested regarding the handling of depleted uranium hexafluoride - also known as uranium tails - the combine receives in conjunction with two European contracts, and about which secrecy is, in fact, not allowed.
Specifically, Bellona had asked for information about the cost of storing and converting uranium tails, how this was financed, as well the cost and characteristics of an experimental installation at the AEKhK called Kedr, which according to Rosatom plans, will begin converting depleted uranium hexafluoride into a less dangerous form.
Leave your Geiger counters at the door
The environmentalists had brought both domestic and foreign produced Geiger counters with them that were confiscated when they arrived at the AEKhK.
“It was with precisely these instruments that I measured radiation on the surface of containers of uranium waste during their transit through St. Petersburg,” said Alimov.
“There are no secret radiation levels. Moreover, exactly this parameter is subject to norms and monitoring by laws governing transport and storage of radioactive materials, If the AEKhK is afraid of independent monitoring of radiation levels, one can assume they have something to hide.”
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| Bellona St. Petersburg’s nuclear and radiation safety coordinator Ponomarenko. |
| Bellona |
Andrei Ponomarnko, the coordinator of nuclear and radiation projects with Bellon St Petersburg, who traveled with the group, said the environmentalists demanded that a staff radiation monitor measure radiation in areas that were of interest to the visiting party, but were told that all staff radiation monitors were busy.
Alexander Terentin, the AEKhK information officer, said the “radiation safety is 99 percent” and that the environmentalists where “not members of group ‘A’” meaning they were apparently forbidden from taking radiation measurements.
Ponomarkenko objected.
“I worked on the Lepse floating spent nuclear waste storage ship. The ship still belongs to the Murmansk Shipping Company. I know that visiting delegations to the Lepse could take radiation levels and photographs,” he said.
“Apparently, Rosatom is not prepared for a dialog – they invited us to simply take us on the tourist route.”
Uranium tail containers off limits
The Angarsk facility took depleted uranium hexafluoride imported from abroad until 2002. Rosatom advisor Igor Konyshev asked Bellona to the Angarsk facility as it is the only e of the four facilities accepting radioactive waste from abroad that does not have a military component.
Yet the environmentalists were still not allowed to inspect the containers of depleted uranium hexafluoride, and facility guides only showed the storage unit to them from afar.
“It was important that we inspect the containers of depleted uranium hexafluoride, evaluated their exteriors and levels of corrosion. After all, they have been stored in the open air for decades,” said Ponomareko.
Bellona is against the ongoing imports of uranium from Europe – particularly Germany and France. According to the environmentalists, the import of uranium tails through the port of St. Petersburg constitutes an import of pure nuclear waste: only a small fraction of useable uranium can be extracted from the uranium tails. The uranium is then sent back to the west while the remaining secondary waste – more than 90 percent of the uranium tails – remains in Russia forever. Over 700,00 tons of this toxic and radioactive waste have accrued in the country.
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| Baikal Environmental Wave’s Rikhanova. |
| Bellona |
“Rosatom head (Sergei) Kiriyenko promised that by the end of 2007, Rosatom would provide the public with its plans for the expansion of the Angarsk Electro-Chemical Combine and that open hearings would be organised, said Baikal Environmental Wave’s Rikhanova.
“However, the International Uranium Enrichment Centre has already been established, and no still information about Rosatom’s plans and their consequences have been provided to Irkutsk and Baikal area residents.”
Rikhanova also endorsed Bellona and Ecodefence’s campaign against the import of uranium tails in her remarks at the press conference.
Baikal Environmental Wave, in conjunction with the Baikal Movement, recently sent 20,000 signatures from a petition of Irkutsk and Angarsk residents to the Russian government against the construction of the International Uranium Enrichment Centre.
“We know from accountings by Rostekhnazor (the Russian Federal Service for Ecological, Technical and Nuclear Oversight) that barrels of uranium tails stored in the open air at Angarsk and other facilities do not meet contemporary safety requirements,” said Alimov.
“The AEKhK did not show us anything that would have us consider otherwise.”
The environmentalists showed a document that had recently received that was signed by Russia’s scandal-tarred former Minister of Atomic Energy, Yevgeny Adamov. The document - order No. 4 from January 1st 2001 – spelled out that one of the Ministry’s main directives was “working out (…) issues of the possibility of returning to customers” the secondary waste associated with reprocessing uranium tails.
However, Rosatom’s current conception for dealing with uranium tails does not take this document into account. International principles dictate the return of radioactive waste to the countries of its origin. The expansion of the Angarsk Combine as the base for the International Uranium Enrichment Centre will lead to the fast tempo production of more and more waste.
The Adamov document also acknowledges the eventuality of breaches to the hermetic seals on the containers of uranium tails and the contamination of local populations and personnel at the concerned facilities – giving detailed projects on what would happen if an airplane crashed into them, a fire broke out and other unpredictable disasters.
Angarsk inspection ‘a day at the beach’
Despite the fact that Rosatom is allowing press tours of the Angarsk facility, they add nothing to increasing transparency. The programme for visitors includes an entire day of tourism, including swimming trips to Lake Baikal, the local museum of the Decembrist Revolutionaries – but no discussion of issues.
According to the environmentalists, Rosatopm is not up to a serious conversation with ecological organisations. The remaining three uranium tail storage facilities near Tomsk, Yekatrinburg and Krasnoyarsk, are even more opaque, and the conditions in which what condition the foreign uranium tails are held under there.
Rashid Alimov wrote and reported from Angarsk and Charles Digges wrote, translated and edited from Oslo.
