Two Bellona activists detained near St. Petersburg while taking radiation readings on waste
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- 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
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- Offloading of radioactive waste shipment underway in St. Petersburg – with some suspicious American arrivals
- Another radioactive waste ship on the approach to St. Petersburg
- Russian environmentalists greet delayed nuclear waste ship
- Russian environmental activists to greet German nuclear waste ship
- UPDATE: Environmentalists detained by police in anti-radwaste protest in St. Petersburg
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- The Bellona Foundation
Organization
The activists were released about an hour later.
Rashid Alimov, editor of Bellona’s Russian pages, along with Alexey Snigirev, also of Bellona, and Tatyana Kulbakina, of Murmansk’s Nature and Youth, where arrested near the Izotop radioactive waste facility in the Leningrad Region.
A photographer with the newspaper Moi Raion was also detained with the activists.
Alimov said by telephone that he and the other activists established that radiation background levels around the waste were higher than normal. No reason for the detention was given by police.
On January 24th, Bellona and Ecodefence, another Russian environmental organisation, staged a protest against continuing shipments of uranium tails to Russia from Germany in central St. Petersburg.
Specifically, the protest, in which some 40 environmentalists participated, was aimed at the arrival of the MV Shouwenbank, which arrived in St. Petersburg carrying 2,000 tons of uranium tails – the radioactive and toxic waste produced during uranium enrichment.
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| Tatyana Kulbakina from Nature and Youth and Alexey Snegirev are holding a banner protesting against radioactive waste import. |
The waste came from the German-Dutch fuel giant Urenco, which, as part of a contract with Russian nuclear fuel company Teksnabexport, has been shipping uranium tails to Russia since 1996.
The contract envisions that Russia will receive a total of 100,000 tons of uranium tails from Urenco. According to Urenco, some 80,000 have already been shipped, and another 20,000 will be shipped before 2009.
Last night, containers of the waste were sent from the St. Petersburg port by road to town of Kapitolovo, where they will be loaded on a train and shipped most likely to Novouralsk in the Ural Mountains, where Urenco’s uranium tails have been sent since 2003.
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See also an article by the St Petersburg Times : Environmentalists Held For Trying to Measure Radiation
