But despite its reception as the first report of its kind, it sparked debate between non-proliferation-based camps in Washington and the more environmentally inclined NGO community, and drew attention to the differences of the American and European Russian nuclear remediation postures.

The report was presented at three venues in the US Capital: The US Government Accounting Office; at a Stimpson hearing series for Capitol Hill staffers arranged by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both on Thursday, and a jointly-held event sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The Bellona delegation consisted of four of the report’s co-authors: Alexander Nikitin, Igor Kudrik, Charles Digges and Nils Bøhmer. The reports other two key authors are Vladimir Kuznetsov of Russia’s Green Crosss and Vladislav Larin an independent nuclear researcher and author.

“This report has brought home to me the importance of Non-Governmental Organizations in getting governments to move forward,” said Rose Gotemoeller, a senior associate with CEIP at the Friday presentation, which was attended by more than 60 US and Russian nuclear experts, NGO members, nuclear industry officials and officials with the DOE and the Cooperative Threat Reduction Programme (CTR).

“Bellona is among the best NGOs both in terms of its thoroughness and grounding and scientific basis.”

Her sentiments were echoed by Mark Helmke, a senior staff member with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Sen. Richard Lugar, one of the original authors of the 1991 Nunn-Lugar, or CTR programme. This programme was the first of its kind in developing bilateral agreements with Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union to destroy nuclear and other weapons strategically targeted at the United States.

The Bellona presentation
The reports main conclusions include that money sent to Russia by the growing number of international donors, including the US, would be better spent on a reformed Russian nuclear industry rather than the monolithic structure Moscow inherited from the Soviet Union and did not re-evaluate. This structure includes a closed nuclear fuel cycle and the over-burdened and environmentally hazardous reprocessing at Russia’s decaying Mayak Chemical Combine.

Nils Båhmer

Kudrik said the Russian nuclear program needed to be reformed to ensure the proper disposal of these materials. "We need to separate ourselves from the Cold War legacy waste that is taking away from today's activities," he said.

The Bellona report praised CTR and other efforts to dismantle Russian submarines, but also pointed to Russia’s crisis with handling the spent fuel taken off these vessels.

Bellona also voiced the opinion that, though international submarine dismantlement was going well, more complicated programs involving western investment such as the Mayak Fissile Materials Storage Facility (FMSF) in the Southern Urals, and the shut down of Russia’s remaining plutonium production reactors, have faltered.

Mayak is also Russia's only spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facility and has been the scene of serious security threats in the past decade. A soldier was arrested for allegedly attempting to break into a warehouse on the premises, copper cabling has been stolen, a stash of aluminum rods was discovered outside the perimeter of the plant and scrap stainless-steel valves with a high level of radioactive contamination were found off the premises.

Such programs as the HEU-LEU programme—which is based on a business to business agreement between the US and Russia’s nuclear fuel manufacturers—allows Russia to maintain the Soviet-era status quo of its nuclear industry to the tune of $500m a yar, and offers no impetus for Moscow to re-assess the current structure of its nuclear industry. Such a re-evaluation of the industry by Russia is essential to the appropriate allocation of future funding based on a strategic “Master Plan,” which Russia has developed for its Northwest but not overall.

Aside from the HEU-LEU agreement, which supplies the Russian nuclear industry with the funding it needs to maintain its creaky status quo, Bellona also singled out CTR’s slow pace on the completion of the FMSF designed for the safe storage facility for 50 tonnes of plutonium and 200 tonnes of HEU have flagged considerably. Begun in 1993, FMSF is CTR’s longest running program to date. Even when fully complete it will only hold 25 tonnes of plutonium and no uranium due to a 2003 decision by the Russian government.

The on-going efforts of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) heads up the Plutonium Disposition program, under which both nations have agreed to destroy 34 tonnes each of surplus weapons grade plutonium have also founded against the rocks of bureaucracy.

Further efforts by the DOE to shut down Russia’s remaining weapons-grade plutonium production reactors—two in Seversk near Tomsk, and one at Zheleznogorsk near Krasnoyarsk, all in central Siberia—have been hobbled by bureaucracy and haggling between Russian and US contractors.

As the reactors in question also supply heat and electricity to the communities where they are located, the DOE’s task it to shut the reactors down completely and build or refurbish nearby fossil fuel plants to compensate for the power loss when the reactors go off-line. But this project has become overburdened by bureaucracy and contractors, and no clear plan to shut down the reactors has yet been developed. It is highly unlikely that the program will be effected prior to 2011. The reactors are meanwhile pumping out a combined 1200-1500 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium each year they remain operational.

Alexander Nikitin (l) and Kudrik confer during the presentation.

Nils Båhmer

Nitkin and Kudrik also called for international oversight to account for the massive amounts of foreign funds pledged to Russia for nuclear remediation projects. "We also need to establish what are the most important nuclear hazards that need to be addressed," he said.

CTR Response—non proliferation vs. nuclear industry reform
Helmke was quick to point out that difficulties encountered in the flagging nuclear projects be “understood in their context.”

He said that Nunn-Lugar’s biggest difficulty arose from the fact that it was created in the Senate between Lugar and then Georgian Sen. Sam Nunn.

“We are constantly having to re-educate presidents and administrations as the come and go, and many of them, like the Bush administration, have came with an agenda of downscaling Nunn-Lugar,” Helmke told the gathering.

Helmke also stressed the need for coordination within CTR itself, as well as with other nations donating money to the cause of nuclear remediation and clean-up in Russia.

“When we think of CTR, we are really thinking of three agencies,” he said, referring to the US Departments of Defence (DOD) Energy (DOE) and State.” As far as coordination with other governments in Europe—they are simply not interested.”

This was also mentioned by Paul Walker of international environmental organisation Global Green—known as Green Cross—outside the United States.

“Everyone has their area of expertise and their own projects and they don’t want to surrender their authority to a central one,” said Walker, who also mediated the discussion. The panel was nonetheless in general agreement that an overall coordination structure for prioritising the most important nuclear issues in Russia was needed.

“Its like the Klondike in NW Russia as different countries try to get a piece of the submarine dismantlement action,” said Gotemoelller. “Ironically, that drives the cost of initiating programmes up as contractors can charge what they want.”

A ticking bomb
But Helmke was reluctant to wait for the Russian nuclear industry to restructure itself from within or by force of donor nations to continue nuclear remediation funding projects in Russia. He said the issue is a race against time in trying to keep terrorists from getting nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union.

"There are a number of unreconstructed cold warriors on both the American and Russian sides, and they often use that to slow down important non-proliferation work," he said. "We have to understand the sense of urgency here. It is remarkable that no terrorist in the past 10 years has been able to get hold of and use any of the nuclear, biological or chemical weapons that are spread all over the former Soviet Union."

Helmke said the issue still needed to become a top global priority for political leadership. "For some reason, this does not seem to rise up as a concern in Europe," he said.

Helmke said issues such as global warming that have held the attention of world leaders need to be put aside for more immediate concerns.

‘Whistling past the graveyard’
"What is the more immediate threat that we face? Is it climate change or is it a terrorist getting his hands on and fashioning a dirty bomb?" Helmke asked. "The problem is that too many of us are whistling past the graveyard on this threat. The threat is so frightening to so many people that we tend to discount it politically and focus on other issues that might be easier to get your heads wrapped around and motivate the public."

He added: "The victims of a future dirty-bomb attack won't want to know what we have or have not done," said Helmke. "This absolutely must become a priority."

Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, USEC executive vice president and chief operating officer.

Nils Båhmer/Bellona

The reason, she said, was that it was a business to business agreement without the involvement of either the Russian or American governments. "Ten percent of the electricity we use in this country comes from (the fuel for nuclear reactors provided by) nuclear warheads that were once aimed at us," she said.

The role of NGOs
In whatever decisions are to be made in the future, Carnegie’s Gotemoeller—who is former deputy secretary of energy in the US DOE—stressed the importance of NGOs keeping the heat governments, but added the caveat the governments and not as set in their ways as may appear from the outside. AS a former US government nuclear official, now a senior associate with Carnegie, she had a unique perspective from both sies of the fence.

As deputy secretary of energy under the Clinton Administration, she said often “gnashed her teeth” when dealing with NGOs.

She said, though, that she is a “great believer in NGOs, especially when watching their progress with the Bush administration.” Because of their involvement, security upgrades at vulnerable nuclear weapons stockpiles will be completes several years ahead of schedule by 2008.

But she added that NGOs sometimes don’t have a completely clear picture of what is going on “on the inside of governments, which are more flexible than they may appear” and some actually welcome outside pressure.