Agence France Presse, December 2, 2000
Russia Plans Reprocessing Plant for Foreign Nuclear Waste
Russian authorities are planning to build a facility to reprocess foreign nuclear waste, even as debate
on importing such waste is raging, ecologists here have charged.
In a statement released by the anti-nuclear group ECODEFENSE on Friday, the ecologists claimed
that Russia's nuclear energy ministry plans to build the new plant near the city of Nizhny Novgorod east of Moscow.
"The storage and reprocessing facility will be used to manage the foreign waste that the ministry
plans to import in the nearest future," in spite of the legal ban on importing waste, the
ECODEFENSE statement said, quoting unnamed officials who provided relevant documents.
Russia's nuclear energy ministry has recently proposed an amendment to Russia's parliament, lifting
the ban.
The proposal, presented to the parliament earlier this year, sparked furious debate and caused
ecologists such as Greenpeace to call for a national referendum in order to resolve the issue.
Though the central election committee has rejected Greenpeace's bid, even those deputies
responsible for introducing the amendment lobbied parliament to postpone the debate indefinitely.
Russian nuclear industry could earn an estimated 20 billion dollars over the next ten years should the
ban be lifted, allowing Russia to import some 20,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel from abroad, the
ministry officials said.
However, environmentalists warn that adding more to Russia's 14,000 tonnes of nuclear waste
already stored near its nuclear reactors could spell an ecological disaster for the country.
"Nuclear industry could not design a safe method for utilization of the nuclear waste for more than
50 years," ECODEFENSE's co-chairman Vladimir Slivyak said in a statement.
"It isn't smart of the Russian government to trust the nuclear ministry anymore," he added.
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