Asia Times: Environmentalists attack recipe for floating nuclear disaster


	March 16, 2001	atimes.com

Central Asia/Russia

Russia's nuclear idea hardly worth floating
By Robin Newbold

The announcement by Russia's Nuclear Power Ministry on Tuesday that it intends to build a floating nuclear power station has sent shockwaves through the world's environmentalists, given Russia's appalling track record in terms of nuclear power. Meanwhile, a bill due to be debated in the Duma next week is further cause for alarm, as if passed it will pave the way for the import of 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from 14 countries for reprocessing or storage.

Russia's nulcear industry has been tainted by the legacy of the Soviet-built Chernobyl power station - now in Ukraine - which became a metaphor for the region's woes. It was scandalously underfunded, technically deficient, poorly managed and bound for disaster. On the night of April 26, 1986, something went wrong with reactor four - terribly wrong. The result was the world's most serious nuclear accident, with radioactivity affecting huge swathes of Russia and continental Europe.

Radioactive material, such as caesium, strontium and plutonium, fell inside a radius of 30 kilometers from the reactor. Caesium accounted for the fallout over Belarus, together with Russia and western Europe. In the first hours after the accident, the fallout of radioactive iodine was also significant. The clean-up operation after the accident assumed huge proportions. Up to 800,000 workers and military personnel were involved. These so-called "liquidators" carried out vital tasks just after the accident and took part in work during the following year. There is scant information about these people, though it is understood that up to 15,000 of them have died since the accident.

An area within a radius of 30 kilometers was declared a "forbidden zone" after the disaster, where no one had the right to live. In total, 135,000 people were evacuated, of whom 91,000 were inhabitants of the "forbidden zone". The evacuation took several weeks and the evacuees received further high doses of radiation in the course of this time. A further 270,000 people now live in areas placed under restrictions because of radiation. Some 400,000 people were especially exposed to radiation in the first weeks after the accident. A dramatic increase in cancer of the thyroid gland in these groups has been documented, especially among the children from the Gomel region in Belarus.

Technically, the accident was caused partly by operator error and partly by faults in the construction of the reactor itself. It all started with an experiment to investigate the possibility of producing electricity from the residual energy in the turbo-generators. The experiment was badly planned, and was led by an electrical engineer who was not familiar with the reactor facility. More worryingly, investigators pointed to "a lack of a safety culture" and a "communication breakdown" as the root cause, a significant vote of no-confidence in the industry as a whole.

While the last operating reactor at Chernobyl was closed down last year by the Ukraine government, Russia still has nine nuclear power plants in operation. The safety standards of the Soviet-designed reactors have been highly questioned by international experts. Russian-constructed reactors are also in operation in Lithuania, the Ukraine, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Slovenia. Russian-constructed reactors in the former East Germany and Armenia have been reportedly closed down because of high safety risks.

During the last decade, technical flaws in Russia's nuclear power plants have become a major concern, according to enviromental organization Bellona. Seven of the nine nuclear power stations lie in the European part of Russia. The most common reactor types are pressurized water reactors, VVER, and graphite-moderated reactors, RBMK. It was an RBMK-type that exploded at Chernobyl in 1986, and Bellona claimed these "reactors are thought to be the world's most dangerous, because of the danger of fire in the graphite moderator and because they lack safety containment which can prevent release in an accident". Bellona added that "after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian nuclear power stations have become debilitated by heavy economic problems. The operators at the stations can go months without being paid, and buying of spare parts and general maintenance becomes neglected".

Given the checkered past of the region's nuclear power industry, Tuesday's statement by Russia's Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov that plans were afoot to build a floating nuclear power plant in the northwestern Russian town of Severodvinsk, has understandably caused grave concern. The move was immediately branded by environmentalists as a breach of federal laws and a danger to locals.

Adamov said that the plant would generate 70 megawatts of power and 50 gigacalories of heat and supply electricity to Severodvinsk and the Northern Machine-Building Plant, the city's biggest power consumer and Russia's largest submarine builder. Nuclear Power Ministry spokesman Yury Bespalko added that the plant would cost US$109.7 million. Although he did not say who would finance the project, another ministry source said investment would be provided by the ministry itself.

The Severodvinsk plant would be built under the same blueprints that had been drawn up in 1998 for another floating nuclear power plant in the Far East the source said. That project, for a station in Pevek, Chukotka, was frozen amid financial problems in the region. It had passed the stage of feasibility studies and parts had even been ordered from the Izhorskiye Plant in St Petersburg.

Feasibility studies for the Severodvinsk plant were scheduled to be completed by the end of 2001. Environmentalists, who have long campaigned against the Far East project as a violation of the law, said Adamov's announcement came as a shock. "Nothing has changed since then in that law," said Ivan Blokov, of environmental group Greenpeace. "It still stipulates that 'the location, drafting and construction of nuclear power plants is prohibited ... in the vicinity of bodies of water of federal significance'".

The planned Severodvinsk plant is to float on the Severnaya Dvina River near the White Sea, located in the Arkhangelsk region, east of Murmansk and Scandinavia. "Undoubtedly, the White Sea and Severnaya Dvina are bodies of water of federal significance," Blokov added. Alexei Yablokov, environmental adviser to former president Boris Yeltsin, was similarly alarmed and said: "In choosing between the two evils, the Pevek station in Chukotka would have been a better evil because it would have caused less damage [if a disaster occurred]. Here, it is too close to the center of Russia and to the Scandinavian countries."

Thomas Nilsen, a spokesman for Bellona, joined the chorus of disapproval, adding he was worried about the local residents most of all. "I was in Severodvinsk a few years ago," he said. "The block of flats are just a few hundred meters away from the place where the plant will be built. It is very dangerous - in the case of even a minor accident that would release radioactive steam from the plant, no one would be able to warn people, or to manage to evacuate them."

A spokesman for Russia's Nuclear Power Ministry was unrepentant, claiming that the Severodvinsk "may become a prototype for a series of this type of station", and brushed aside envirmonental concerns about a floating nuclear facility when he added "there are nuclear submarines and icebreakers. The Americans even have nuclear aircraft carriers." It is debatable whether this vote of confidence will be enough to convince environmental campaigners, however.

Indeed, a Greenpeace report on floating nuclear plants has already decried their feasability, the organization concluding that such facilities "are dangerous and unacceptable from the environmental point of view as well as not profitable". The report added: "Proliferation of such plants will result in the dramatic increase of the possibilities for obtaining fissile materials that could be used to make nuclear weapons, which would undermine non-proliferation efforts. Floating nuclear power plants scattered around the world would increase possibilities for international nuclear blackmailing and terrorism."

There was further bad news for the environmentalists this week, when Russian President Vladimir Putin ignored a plea from 650 Russian organizations to veto a bill due for passage in the Duma next week that would allow the import of spent nuclear fuel into the country. Putin left Tuesday for a skiing vacation without deeming to reply to the petition.

If the legislation is passed by the Federation Council and signed into law by Putin, it would open the door to a $20 billion project by the Nuclear Power Ministry to import 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from 14 countries for reprocessing or storage. Monday's letter was a second attempt by environmentalists to attract attention to the pending legislation that they claim will turn Russia into an international nuclear waste dump.

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