Russian environmentalists greet delayed nuclear waste ship
Some 40 activists, one dressed in a hazmat suit and make up imitating radiation poisoning, gathered to protest the delivery of 2,000 tons of uranium tailings to St. Petersburg.
Rashid Alimov/Bellona
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Organization
The load of uranium tails – which Russian legislation classifies as waste, but which the nuclear industry classifies as raw material for reprocessing – has been followed by protestors at both land and sea.
Offloading of the waste has so far been postponed for reasons that were not explained, though protestors report the delay is likely linked to their presence.
Bellona will continue to monitor the load as it passes through St. Petersburg by road to the Izotop facility in the Leningrad Region, and from there to storage most likely in Novouralsk, in the Ural Mountains, where Urenco’s tails have been shipped since 2003.
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| The perimeter of the Izotop facility in the Leningrad Region to where the uranium tailings will be delivered from the port of St. Petersburg and from which they will be shipped to Novouralsk. |
| Rashid Alimov/Bellona |
Some 40 protestors - one wearing a hazmat suit and make-up imitating radiation poisoning - gathered Thursday at a rally arranged jointly by Bellona St. Petersburg and Ecodefence bearing placards with the slogans “No to the import of radioactive waste” and “Today St. Petersburg received waste from Germany.” (Photos from the protest can be found here).
The waste is from the joint German-Dutch nuclear fuel giant Urenco, which in 1996 signed a deal with Russia to import some 100,000 tons of uranium tailis by the year 2009, of which 80,000 tons has already been imported. EU countries by and large do not classify uranium tails as radioactive waste, but the United States does.
Grey areas in Russian legislation allow the waste to come into the country by classifying the material as the stuff of reprocessing, though remarks from Sergei Kiriyenko, chief of Russia’s nuclear power agency Rosatom, make it clear enough that Russia regards the material legally as waste as well.
Last year, Kiriyenko promised that he would not renew the contract with Urenco when it runs out in 2009. Russia is still waiting for the additional 20,000 tons of uranium tailis as specified by the contract.
Bellona and Ecodefence jointly demand that the contract imports be stopped now - not two years from now.
Unloading of waste delayed
“The ship put in at six in the morning on January 23rd, however they have not yet unloaded the containers of uranium tails or sent them to the Urals,” said Vladimir Slivyak, co-chairman of Ecodefence.
“It’s possible this is tied to the protests – the load is already more than 24 hours late, and that is not just a financial loss for the deliverer, but a big success for those who protest the import of nuclear waste to Russia.”
“The transport of such loads is extremely dangerous,” said Bellona St. Petersburg’s Rashid Alimov, who is editor of Bellona Web’s Russian-language pages.
“They are prone to incidents of failed hermetic seals on the containers, which could lead to subjecting a huge number of people to toxic and radioactive contamination of large areas, including St. Petersburg and Moscow, which is a serious risk in this situation.”
The Urenco contract
The German division of Urenco owns two of Europes largest energy concerns, Germany’s E.On and RWE. The board of both firms confirmed to Ecodefence in 2007 that they had already sent 80,000 tons of uranium tails to Russia, and another 20,000 remained to be sent prior to 2009.
Over the course of the contract, the waste has been sent for storage to Novouralsk, Seversk, near Tomsk, Angarsk, near Irkutsk, and Zelenogorsk, near Krasnoyarsk, all in Siberia.
Article 48 of Russia’s legislation on environmental preservation forbids the import of radioactive waste into Russia for any purpose.
In March 2007, Ecodefence and a number of German ecological organisations held protests outside the offices of E.On in Düsseldorf, and also appeared in European Parliament hearings to criticise the Russia-Urenco contract.
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| Activists with Ecodefence blockading the German Embassy in protest of the uranium tailings shipments from Urenco. |
| Ecodefence |
In November 2006 activists from Russia and Germany held an hour and a half blockade of Urenco’s Gronau enrichment facility. In October of that same year, activists also blockaded the German embassy in Moscow.
Other protests of the ongoing shipments were held over the summer and early this autumn in the cities of Tomsk, Yekatrinburg and Irkutsk.
Russia activists also turned to German prosecutors in November with the demand that Urenco stop its illegal shipments. The investigation is still ongoing.
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