The Moscow Times, January 4, 2001
Why Russia Wants Waste
By Pavel Felgenhauer
Last month the State Duma voted overwhelmingly to approve a
government-backed law that will amend current legislation and allow Russia
to import highly radioactive waste from foreign countries. While this was
not the final reading of the bill, its eventual approval seems virtually
inevitable. This result seems strange at first glance since all polls show
that the Russian public is unequivocally opposed to such imports. Last fall
environmental activists collected more than 2.5 million signatures calling
for a national referendum on the issue. But the Central Elections Commission
rejected this petition on a technicality, and now Duma deputies have shown
no difficulty voting against the clearly expressed will of their
constituencies.
Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov has predicted Russia will earn up to
$20 billion over the next 10 to 15 years by importing foreign waste. Adamov
and other officials have stressed that spent nuclear fuel is not "waste,"
but a valuable commodity. After reprocessing, they maintain, plutonium and
uranium may be extracted and recycled. They also try to make the idea more
palatable by saying that proceeds from these imports will be used to clean
up existing contaminated zones.
It is certainly true that many areas of the country are radioactively
contaminated: The worst zone is in the Urals, in the region around
Chelyabinsk. However, there are simply no effective means of "cleaning"
large -scale radioactive contamination.
When relatively small radioactive spills occur, the contaminated earth is
put into steel barrels and buried somewhere. Hard surfaces are washed with
water and detergent. These methods are obviously not practical when hundreds
of square kilometers are contaminated. After the 1986 nuclear disaster in
Chernobyl, there were initial attempts to wash down roads and buildings with
detergent, but they were soon abandoned and everything was just left to
decompose naturally.
The claim that imported waste will be "reprocessed" is also a sham. After
all, Russia does not have enough capacity to reprocess the spent nuclear
fuel that it produces itself. More importantly, reprocessing spent nuclear
fuel does not make economic sense. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia and
the United States have been dismantling their nuclear arsenals and many
Western countries have been scaling back their civilian nuclear power
programs. As a result, the world is awash with cheap uranium and there is
simply no realistic market for recycled plutonium.
So why, then, do the Duma and the Kremlin support such a dangerous and
doubtful plan? It can hardly be for the money. After all, last year Russia
had a trade surplus of about $50 billion. A few hundred million in revenues
from importing waste simply won't make much of a difference.
The explanation for the extraordinary unanimity of the political elite on
the waste imports issue is the typical one: defense considerations. In April
1999, the Security Council (President Vladimir Putin was the secretary of
the Security Council at that time) ordered the Nuclear Power Ministry to
speed up the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including
so-called "penetrators." These weapons are designed to burrow down tens of
meters underground before exploding. The Security Council also ordered the
development of a new generation of very low-yield tactical, battlefield
nuclear weapons.
Immediately after Putin announced the Security Council decision, Adamov
began to clamor for foreign nuclear waste and a bill was introduced in the
Duma. In May 1999, Adamov told a conference: "They told us to accelerate
military nuclear programs, but said we should do that using our own sources
of revenue." In effect that meant the only way Russia can develop a new
generation of weapons is if the West is willing to pay for it by dumping its
nuclear waste here.
The gist of the Adamov plan - to make the West pay for a new generation of
nukes that may be eventually used against it - has clearly captured the
imagination of the Russian elite. During the Duma debate last month, leading
Communist deputy and former Politburo member Anatoly Lukyanov said that
anyone opposing the nuclear waste bill must be an "American agent." In fact,
the U.S. government has already endorsed Russia's initiative to import
nuclear waste. But true Russian patriots will not be fooled by such tricks.
Foreign radioactive waste will soon be on its way in.
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent, Moscow-based defense analyst.
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