The Moscow Times, December 22, 2000
Deputies Back Plan To Import Fuel Rods
By Oksana Yablokova
Lawmakers gave their stamp of approval Thursday to a bill that would allow the Nuclear Power Ministry to earn billions of dollars by reprocessing and storing spent nuclear rods from other countries. Environmentalists strongly denounced the bill as a step toward making Russia the world's nuclear waste dump.
State Duma deputies passed the legislation in first reading with a vote of 319 -38 and six abstentions.
Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov, who has been fiercely lobbying for the program for months, said Russia needs the cash from importing spent nuclear fuel to pay for the cleanup of its own radioactive spills.
"We'll get financing and won't disgracefully beg the International Monetary Fund for money as we do now," Adamov said.
The reprocessing and storage program could earn Russia some $ 20 billion over 10 years by importing up to 21,000 tons of waste, according to the Nuclear Power Ministry. The spent fuel would come from 14 European and Asian countries and be sent back after 50 years.
A second Duma reading is scheduled for Jan. 22. The bill would then have to pass a third hearing before being sent to the Federation Council and President Vladimir Putin for approval.
The law currently bans the import of nuclear materials for storage. Russia accepts spent fuel rods from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia for reprocessing under a program set up in Soviet times.
Opponents to the Duma measure said the ministry was looking out for its own interests and not trying to clean up contaminated areas. They said they doubted the government would ever send the spent fuel back.
"The ministry has gone wild trying to get cash," said Alexei Yablokov, a former environment adviser for the Kremlin. "Everything they offer is aimed at the construction of new reactors." Russia's 29 nuclear plants are quickly aging and many of them will have to be replaced over the next decade, he said in a telephone interview.
Ivan Blokov, head of the Greenpeace Russia environmentalist group, said the ministry's proposals had been drawn up without proper ecological expertise.
"These people have gone against the will of the electorate," Blokov said.
The vote Wednesday took place less than a month after environmentalists tried to block it with a call for a national referendum on the proposal. Central Election Commission turned down the petition, saying that 600,000 of the 2.5 million signatures submitted were invalid due to technical inaccuracies such as missing signatures and improper passport numbers.
Blokov said the Nuclear Power Ministry should have turned for advice to nuclear waste experts such as those who worked for the State Environmental Committee, which Putin abolished earlier this year, and for Gosatomnadzor, the government's nuclear safety watchdog.
Gosatomnadzor head Yury Vishnevsky, and outspoken critic of the ministry's plan, said in a telephone interview that no one from his organization had been invited to attend the Duma hearings Wednesday.
"The deputies were blinded by generous promises, or they hopelessly made a decision for which the next generation will have to pay," he said.
Vishnevsky said he is concerned about the proposed law because Russia is technically unready to accept nuclear materials for reprocessing and for storage.
Russia currently has only one reprocessing plant, Mayak in the Ural Mountains, and one storage facility, based in Zheleznogorsk in the Krasnoyarsk region.
Vishevsky said the storage site can only take up to 3,000 tons of nuclear waste, and it is rapidly being filled up with spent fuel from Russian nuclear plants.
"Our (nuclear power) plants would have to be closed or new multibillion-dollar storages would need to be built in order to take (waste from abroad)," he said.
Thomas Nilsen of the Norwegian Bellona Group said that the planned program could earn the government a huge chuck of cash over the next decade, but that the state was not considering the cost of storing the rods - especially if they are never sent back to other countries. It takes thousands of years before spent fuel becomes safe.
"It will cost enormous amounts of money to clean it up and store it," Nilsen said. "To say it will be economical profitable for Russia to import spent fuel is in the (ministry's) dreams.
"How much will it cost Russia to maintain the spent fuel storage for 200,000 years? How much will it cost Russia to employ security guards for this spent fuel for 200,000 years?"
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