But the three who turned up for work that day at the half-constructed fossil fuel plant, located some 15 kilometres from the Zheleznogorsk Mining and Chemical Combine, or GKhK, told Bellona Web that they would be — and have been for months — the only workers likely to be coming to work. Identifying themselves only as "residents of Central Asia," they freely said they were working without documents or contracts, and only vaguely knew what kind of construction they were to be performing.

"Every couple of days, someone comes by and pays us in vodka and a few roubles," said one worker — older than the other two — explaining the clinking in his daypack.

"Then we set to work with bricks and mortar, building some sort of wall, but we're not sure what it's for because we have no design to follow."

The fossil fuel plant has been under construction for more than a decade.
But non-proliferation funding from the US Department of Energy (DOE) is slated to complete the plant's construction in order to supply heat and power to the closed nuclear city of Zheleznogorsk, which has previously staved away the hard Siberian freeze with a weapons-grade plutonium-producing reactor. But that reactor is scheduled to be shut down in four years.

Pressures from Minatom
Last week, Zheleznogorsk received a visit by a cortege from the Russia Nuclear Power Ministry, or Minatom, which included First Deputy Nuclear Power Ministers Mikhail Solonin and Vladimir Vinogradov. Vinogradov said Zheleznogorsk is "one of Minatom's most problematic enterprises."

The problems, he said, according to the RIA news agency, stemmed from the necessity of converting the production of the city, closing down those workshops engaged in weapons production, while maintaining the scientific viability of the combine.

Of equal importance, he said, was completing the construction of the dry storage facility for spent nuclear fuel (SNF) at Zheleznogorsk's RT-2 facility, leaving little eleventh-hour doubt that controversial SNF imports will soon be apart of Russia's nuclear landscape.

"This city will maintain its scientific value in the nuclear community," Vinogradov said, according to Interfax news agency. In order to make sure that was the case, he ordered the administration of the Zheleznogorsk GKhK to have a report about the next 20 years' development of Zheleznogorsk on his desk soon, RIA reported.

Presumably, this development begins with the refurbishing of the Sosnovoborsk TETs, with US DOE funding, as quickly as possible.

Pressures from the Americans
The option of building a brand new fossil fuel plant for Zheleznogorsk, instead of refurbishing the old one has, according to DOE officials, been discussed by the Russian side. But according to Anatoly Mamaev, of Zheleznogorsk's Citizens' Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation, "the time has long come, and therefore this question of where to build the fossil fuel plant has to be decided quickly — otherwise the Americans may not give us the money."

"They have already warned us once," he told Bellona Web.

The most logical choice, therefore — for which a local subcontractor, Glavspetsstroi, has already been picked, according to news reports — is the half-constructed behemoth outside Sosnovoborsk, located 15 kilometres from the closed nuclear city.

Why the hurry? Because the Zheleznogorsk plutonium reactor is scheduled for shut-down by 2006 as part of a non-proliferation agreement with the United States, which has already closed all the 14 plutonium reactors of its own.

Russia has two other plutonium reactors, both located in Seversk, near Tomsk in Central Siberia, and they too are scheduled to close in 2006. Combined, these three reactors produce 1,500 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium a year. Seversk will also receive a fossil fuel plant on the DOE tab.

But progress in the decade-long doldrums of economic reform at the Sosnovoborsk plant has not been rapid, and the DOE has a major task before it in jump-starting the effort.

The plants construction began in the mid 1980's in order to provide power and heating backup to the nuclear city should routine, or otherwise, shutdowns of the plutonium reactor plunge the Siberian city into cold and darkness. Funding for the construction, however, dried up altogether with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, and since then construction has been insignificant and intermittent.

Whose plant is it?

There is also confusion as to what government agency is responsible for the Sosnovoborsk fossil fuel plant at present.

Charles Digges/Bellona

But, according to environmental groups in Moscow and Sosnovoborsk, the plant's construction is under Minatom's purview, and the workers, as well as activists who have been inside the facility, say warning signs, posted by Minatom, are to be found throughout.

One Sosnovoborsk environmental activist — in fact Sosovoborsk's only environmental activist, Yevgeny Spirin — insisted in an interview with Bellona Web that the plant was under the control of Minatom, which has been using it as a money laundering front since the construction began.

"In the same amount of time and with the same amount of money it has taken them to build a third of this TETs, you could have built four fossil fuel plants for Zheleznogorsk," said Spirin. "And there is no way to get information from Minatom about when this plant will be complete, what ecological standards it will adhere to — nothing."

But Nikolai Shingarev, head of Minatom's board for relations with government agencies and information policy, said Spirin and others were barking up the wrong tree and denied Minatom was responsible for any current activities — modest though they may be — at the plant. He told Bellona Web that Minatom made a substantial investment in the fossil fuel plant, which was meant to provide a substitute source of energy for the nuclear city when construction began in the mid-1980s.

"It is impossible that this plant is ‘no one's responsibility,'" said Shingarev. "That just doesn't happen — it is a government facility. It's just a matter of figuring out which part of the government answers for it."

Shingarev also dismissed Spirin's allegations of money laundering.

Mamaev said that many of the original costs of starting the plant's construction came from Krasnoyarsk's regional budget — presumably augmented by federal and Minatom funds mentioned by Shingarev.

But Mamaev added that there were protracted squabbles during the building of the plant as to who would get the profits from its heating and electric revenues — Zheleznogorsk, the Krasnoyarsk Regional administration, the then Ministry of Energy or the now defunct Sredmash, the Soviet-era cover name for Minatom. This impasse, according to Mamaev, also contributed to halting the plant's construction and its current quasi-leaderless state.

Spirin said that he had approached the administrations of both Zheleznogorsk and the Krasnoyarsk region in his search for information about the plant, only to be pointed back to Minatom — though he added none of the officials he spoke with were entirely sure Minatom was the place to turn to.

Meanwhile, back at the TETs, the self-appointed spokesman for the rag-tag group of workers said their workday ended when the vodka ran out or it got too hot to continue. "It feels like working in Soviet times," he said with a gold-toothed smile and entered the restricted zone through a shabby gate to add another few kilograms of mortar to the plant.

What the DOE is inheriting
Obviously, this is a work ethic the DOE intends to change in 2003, once it takes over the project of shutting down Russia's three plutonium reactors and brings to bear part of the $49 million the US government has allocated out of its budget for the "Elimination of Russian Weapons-Grade Plutonium Production" on refurbishing the TETs plant. That project alone is estimated at $14 million.

But aside from having to deal with the apparent confusion over who is responsible for the plant, the DOE is also inheriting a task that has languished in the arms of US Department of Defence's Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) programme for ten years.

The original plan, under the DOD-CTR approach, was to perform a so-called core conversion on the reactors, a process that would have converted them in such a way as to stop them from generating volumes of weapons-grade plutonium. But according to former US government officials, the CTR programme had neither competent management nor sound science on its side.

All three of Russia's plutonium producing reactors — which are on average 34 years old— are pioneers of the fatally flawed Chernobyl-style RBMK-1000, which makes core conversion an invitation to nuclear disaster. Because of this, the DOE could also inherit another $75 million in unspent funds from the DOD's failed core conversion project to spend toward the reactor shut-down project next year, for a possible total of $124 million in 2003.

Zheleznogorsk's reaction

Eduard Zavdugayev, head of public and external relations for the Zheleznogork administration, addresses activists at an anti-nuke camp near Krasnoyarsk.

Charles Digges/Bellona

"If our city had taken a vote last year on whether to close down the reactor, more than 50 percent would have voted no," fumed Zavdugayev to 60 members of an anti-nuke protest camp, which was set up in early July near Zheleznogorsk.

"We have to shut down that reactor, and that reactor heats our city, which means we need to build that TETs or freeze."

He added, however, that many Zheleznogorsk residents are against the TETs not on the grounds of the employment insecurity it will cause the closed city, but on environmental grounds as well.

"We have been reassured that the TETs will be built to modern standards with all sorts of new technology, but the fact is that it is a fossil fuel plant with smoke stacks, the pollution from which will effect the environment," he told the camp participants.

"So the next question is how will we live," Zavdugayev continued bitterly. "There is at the moment no other source of heat or power [besides the reactor]. Many of us are against closing it down — further action lies in the hands of the authorities and what they want."

The drive for SNF
But in a later interview with Bellona Web, Zavdugayev was far more sanguine, and the change from his fiery attitude on the public rostrum to his calm demeanour during a private conversation can only be explained by one thing — the revenues from SNF storage at Zheleznogorsk's RT-2 facility that have most bureaucrats in the Krasnoyarsk region rubbing their hands.

"We don't see the closure of the reactor as a catastrophe or an interruption of our way of life, but rather a shift in the infrastructure of the city's mission," Zavdugayev said.

"Yes, the reactor will close, but we also will need highly skilled nuclear scientists to monitor the proposed burial facility for fissile waste," he said referring to the as yet incomplete RT-2 temporary storage facility in Zheleznogorsk.

"We also need qualified reactor scientists — which we already have — to monitor the reactor itself for the next 50 years, until radiation levels subside to levels safe enough to dismantle it. When viewed in that light — plus the SNF imports — the shut-down of the reactor has gained us employment for decades."

RT-2

RT-2 reprocessing plant under never-ending construction.

Photo: Thomas Nilsen

Math errors aside, Minatom proposes to charge $1 billion for 2,000 tonnes of foreign SNF — which Rumyantsev said significantly undercuts Russia's main competitors — that will remain in the RT-2 dry cask storage while Minatom applies the proceeds of its import fees to upgrading Russia's ailing reprocessing infrastructure.

The storage of SNF will mean big cash dividends, both for Zheleznogorsk, and the Krasnoyarsk region as a whole, and administration will be paid several million dollars for hosting the waste.

Zavdugayev even cited areas where the Zheleznogorsk economy could grow — thanks precisely to the fossil fuel plant he not minutes before denounced as ecologically unsound and a plague to the people of his city.

"We are planning aerospace fuel experiments — like NASA's — with plutonium and uranium as the reactor programme phases out," he said. Minatom would not comment on these specific plans.

"There will be no lack of work for our brain power, but this is something these ‘greens' just don't understand. They hear SNF and plutonium, and alarm bells go off. Well, we already have some 3,000 tonnes of SNF in storage at RT-2 and it poses a danger to no one. No one."

Points of "agreement"
If there is any common ground to be found between self-financed activist like Spirin and a paid representative of the nuclear industry like Zavdugayev, it is the potential for further pollution from the TETs once it goes into operation.

Although Zavdugayev seemed to mention the potential pollution from the TETs as a rhetorical tool to turn the tables on the environmentalists, rather than an expression of actual concern for the environment, Spirin raised this point in a later interview.

"The TETs is being built on old plans with old methods and there is a great risk that the area will be severely harmed by pollution from the smoke stacks that will billow out a layer of ash on the surrounding forests," he said.

"As for the DOE plan, anything is possible — if they refurbish the plant to ecological standards, then I am for the plan. But I don't think it will help us much if they stick to the old plant blueprints, which they might do if they are concerned about the 2006 deadline."