* Russians to monitor NORAD - to avert war in event of Y2K glitch
* U.S., Russia ... Team Will Watch For False Alarms (2)
* Russia says nuclear power plants safe
* Chernobyl Radiation to be Contained with Silicon Foam
* A reluctant return to a nuclear nightmare - the children of Chernobyl
* RUSSIA - A Half Century of Nuclear Blasts
* Thieves Cripple Russian Nuclear Sub (2)
* Russia Nuclear Waste Dump Reopens
* Russia Wants to Store World's Radioactive Waste

Russians to monitor NORAD
Scientists' presence designed to avert war in event of Y2K glitch

By Michael Romano, September 11, 1999, Denver Rocky Mountain News Washington Bureau
http://insidedenver.com/news/0911nuke2.shtml

WASHINGTON -- A contingent of Russian nuclear-weapons officers will spend New Year's Eve in Colorado at one of America's most sensitive strategic sites.

They'll be at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, monitoring missile-defense data from nearby Cheyenne Mountain in hopes of avoiding a computer glitch that might trigger nuclear war.

The Russian officers will witness the workings of the U.S. Space Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command's early warning missile-defense system.

U.S. officials say the presence of Russian observers at NORAD could prevent Armageddon if the Russians' problem-plagued missile-defense system malfunctions at midnight because of the Year 2000 Millennium Bug.

A computer glitch could shut off Russia's radar, leading them to assume the worst and order a massive missile strike.

"We are not doing this because we anticipate that there is any great problem at stake here," a senior defense official said at a Pentagon briefing Friday. He asked not to be named.

"It's not because we think we're, you know, teetering on the edge of a potential false launch or anything of that sort.

"But were there to be some sort of problem, it would certainly be useful to have our people in direct contact and direct communication (with the Russians)."

After months of on-and-off negotiations, the two countries have agreed to create a temporary and unclassified Center for Strategic Stability and Y2K at Peterson, which is about 10 miles across town from the NORAD nerve center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain.

The agreement to place 10 to 20 Russians at Peterson for two weeks will be signed Monday in Moscow by Defense Secretary William Cohen and his Russian counterpart.

Working in shifts, pairs of Russian and American military officials will monitor data delivered from Cheyenne Mountain to a renovated finance building at Peterson.

"The concern is that satellite systems and radar might have problems and cause the country (Russia) to go blind," said Army Maj. Mike Birmingham, a spokesman for the U.S. Space Command.

"If that happened, it could cause some concerns with strategic stability, and that's why, if one country's satellites go down, we've got people from the two countries, side by side. This will avoid any inadvertent problem."

Republican Sen. Wayne Allard, a member of the Select Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said, "We want (Russians) with us if their systems fail. The purpose is to get them to feel comfortable to the fact that we won't be mounting an attack."

The Russians will not be observing America's early-warning system from a front row seat inside the command center at Cheyenne Mountain, where the first thick blast door one-third of a mile inside can withstand 1.5 million tons of TNT, Birmingham said.

Instead, they will have to rely on reports delivered to their far-less-sensitive post nearby at Peterson, which serves as headquarters for NORAD and the U.S. Space Command.

"How do the Russians know we're telling them the truth?" Birmingham said. "I think it's in our own best interest to tell them the truth."

Cheyenne Mountain, while top secret, has been opened in the past to visiting military officials from Russia.

Two groups of Russians have toured Cheyenne Mountain under the terms of a cooperative agreement, most recently last March, Birmingham said.

The U.S. military, apparently convinced that the American defense system is Y2K-compliant, will not send observers to Russia's missile-defense nerve center.

---

U.S., Russia Agree to Establish Y2K Center
Team Will Watch For False Alarms

By Stephen Barr Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 11, 1999; Page A09
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/11/094l-091199-idx.html

U.S. and Russian defense officials have agreed to set up a joint center in Colorado to watch for any false alarms of missile attacks caused by Year 2000 computer problems, the Defense Department said yesterday.

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and his Russian counterpart, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, will sign an agreement establishing the center during Cohen's visit to Moscow next week, a senior defense official told reporters.

For the last year, U.S. officials have said the Year 2000 computer glitch, known as Y2K, will not cause nuclear missiles to launch. They have portrayed the joint center as a prudent step to avoid confusion in the event early-warning systems or launch detection equipment malfunctioned.

Yesterday, the official, who spoke on condition that he not be identified, said the Pentagon wanted to be clear that neither side was "teetering on the edge of a potential false launch or anything of the sort. We just think it is a very useful thing to extend our cooperation in areas of this nature. . . .

"And at this time of Y2K transition, were there to be some sort of problem, it would certainly be useful to have our people in direct contact and direct communications with one another," the official said.

The official said up to 20 Russian military officers would be assigned to the Center for Strategic Stability and Y2K, at the U.S. Space Command headquarters in Colorado Springs, during late December and early January.

Discussions to set up the center began last year but broke off after NATO bombed Serbia, a Russian ally. The Pentagon official said the talks resumed last month.

Cohen and Sergeyev also will discuss creating a permanent missile early warning system center in Moscow--an idea supported by Presidents Clinton and Boris Yeltsin.

The Year 2000 problem stems from the use in many computer systems of two-digit date fields, which may cause some software and microchip systems to interpret "00" as 1900, not 2000. The confusion could cause the computers to malfunction or stop.

Shortly before the Pentagon announcement, members of Congress who have studied the Y2K problem held a news conference urging the federal government, states and localities to step up the pace of computer fixes and tests.

They also suggested that international air travel could face disruptions because of Y2K problems. "I have no fear of flying on January 1 within the United States. But I think the safety of air travel abroad has yet to be determined," Rep. Jim Turner (D-Tex.) said. Rep. Constance A. Morella (R-Md.) said she has "grave concerns about what's happening outside of the United States."

At the urging of Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.), the Transportation Department released a list of 35 nations who had not responded as of Thursday to a survey by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The international aviation group had requested nations to submit Year 2000 computer assessments by July 1.

The nations not responding to the ICAO survey were: Albania, Angola, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brunei, Burundi, Cambodia, Comoros, Cook Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Fiji, Guinea, Iraq, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Libya, Micronesia, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Russia, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Tajikistan, Tonga and Vanuatu.

Dave Smallen, the U.S. Transportation Department Y2K spokesman, said: "This is simply a list of countries that did not respond to the ICAO survey. I don't think that you can read anything specific into the fact that any country didn't respond."

Smallen said the Transportation Department and the Defense Department were conducting a review of Y2K readiness and would post information on Transportation's Web site (www.dot.-gov/fly2k) by the end of this month.

---

U.S., Russia To Set Up Joint Y2K Missile Center

By Charles Aldinger, September 10 5:23 PM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19990910/tc/russia_usa_8.html
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/biztech/articles/11russia-us-y2k.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Russia will sign an agreement next week for their military officers to jointly staff a center in Colorado as the new year dawns to watch for false warnings of missile attacks sparked by year 2000 computer bugs, the Pentagon said Friday.

Defense Secretary William Cohen and Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev will sign the agreement to set up the temporary center Monday during talks in Moscow to improve military cooperation, a senior Pentagon official told reporters.

The official, who asked not to be identified, said up to 20 Russian officers would be assigned to the ``Center for Strategic Stability and Y2K'' between late December and early January at U.S. Space Command headquarters at Colorado Springs.

The confidence-building operation will use U.S. early-warning satellites and advanced computers, and could reassure Moscow if Y2K computer problems in Russia mistakenly signaled a missile launch somewhere in the world.

Both Russia and the United States have thousands of long-range nuclear missiles and officials on both sides are anxious to avoid an unlikely but potentially disastrous mistake.

The official, who briefed reporters on Cohen's two-day visit to Russia Monday and Tuesday, cautioned that neither side felt ''we are teetering on the edge of a potential false launch or anything of the sort,'' but that the step was a sign of cooperation.

``And at this time of Y2K transition, were there to be some sort of problem, it would certainly be useful to have our people in direct contact and direct communications with one another,'' he said.

Formal agreement for the center was reached quietly in late August as U.S.-Russia relations improved following strains over Moscow's strong opposition to NATO bombing of Serbia, the official said.

The center would watch out for any indications of possible missile launches by or against either of the two countries.

``The Russians have agreed that this facility should be established and have agreed to participate in it,'' the official said. ``Secretary Cohen and Minister Sergeyev will be signing the joint statement in Moscow committing the two sides to proceed with this particular effort associated with our wider set of cooperation on Y2K.''

Cohen and Sergeyev will also discuss plans for a permanent joint early missile warning center to be established later in Moscow. Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin have already agreed that such a center should be set up.

The two defense leaders will meet at the defense ministry in Moscow Monday to discuss a wide range of issues, including nuclear arms cuts and controversial plans by the United States to establish an anti-missile defense system.

En route home to Washington Tuesday, Cohen will fly to the Arctic Circle on northern Russia's Kola Peninsula for a first-hand look at Russia's destruction of submarines at Severodvinsk under arms bilateral arms reduction agreements.

---

Russia says nuclear power plants safe

11:56 a.m. Sep 10, 1999 Eastern, By Matthew Green
http://www.dogpile.com - search Infoseek

LONDON, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Russian Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeny Adamov said on Friday that Russia's nuclear power plants were as safe as those in Western Europe and unlikely to suffer millennium computer glitches.

``I think we have the same level of safety in all our units as Western units of the same vintage,'' Adamov told reporters in London.

An explosion at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine in April 1986 spewed a cloud of radioactive dust over parts of Russia and Europe and raised fears among Western officials of repeat disasters at similar Soviet reactors.

Adamov said that since the collapse of the Soviet Union and a thawing in relations with the West, joint teams of Russian and Western experts had cooperated to improve safety through training and upgrading equipment.

``Many people think that it (safety) is only a Russian problem, it's not true,'' said Adamov, in London for the annual Symposium of the Uranium Institute.

He said he did not envisage any problems with the millennium computer bug, which may scramble systems that have not been programmed to recognise the date change to 2000.

He said the rate of unplanned shutdowns at Russian reactors was equal to that of Germany, and lower than France or the United States.

The G7 group of leading industrial nations launched a nuclear safety initiative at its Munich summit in 1992 for Soviet-built reactors based on the same technology that caused the Chernobyl disaster.

Gennady Nefedov, a deputy head of department at the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry, said spending on safety had been increased with international help.

``The implemented upgrading efforts have resulted in a significant upgrading in the safety and reliability of Russian nuclear power plants,'' he said.

---

Chernobyl Radiation to be Contained with Silicon Foam

September 1, 1999 (ENS)
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/sep99/1999L-09-01-01.html

WASHINGTON, DC - A patented silicon geopolymer developed by scientists at the Kurchatov Research Institute in Moscow to contain radiation at the contaminated Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor is about to get its first full-scale application. The substance, called EKOR foam, is designed to prevent radioactive dust from leaving the area surrounding Chernobyl. It forms a permanent barrier between the soil and the air, trapping the contamination.

Unit 4 at Chernobyl after the disaster (Photos courtesy Kurchatov Institute)

The nuclear reactor was the scene of the world's worst nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986 when an overwhelming power surge during a test produced enough heat to rupture part of the fuel supply.

Two explosions destroyed the core of Unit 4 and the roof of the reactor building at the Chernobyl Power Complex, about 130 kilometres north of Kiev, Ukraine. Intense fires were responsible for the dispersion of radionuclides and fission fragments high into the atmosphere and across much of Europe.

Radioactive dust is still a problem at the site as the housing for the reactor continually decays under the influence of radiation and weather.

The EKOR barrier will not permit water penetration and will remain in place for centuries without degrading. For nuclear fuel encapsulation, EKOR is effective for extended periods of time because it does not degrade under radiation as most material such as glass. An EKOR coating will eliminate the threat of radioactive materials leaking to the air, soil, surface or ground water from these dangerous fuel-containing masses, developers say.

The once liquified core of the Chernobyl reactor. If it reaches critical mass, the explosion would be much larger than the original explosion that rained radioactive fallout throughout Europe.

Kurchatov Research Holdings, Ltd. based in Germany and its 50 percent partner Eurotech, Ltd. of Washington, DC, expect that the first revenue generating project to employ the EKOR compound will be a site wide application at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the immediate future. The two companies have an equal interest of 50 percent of the net profits generated by Eurotech, Ltd. from the sale or licensing of EKOR.

The application of EKOR at Chernobyl would occur some time after a successful application demonstration of EKOR requested by the Chernobyl authorities to suppress nuclear dust and isolate fuel-containing masses under the various conditions present at the reactor.

The new enclosure now in place around the reactor, called a sarcophagus

In 1997, the G-7 nations approved the Shelter Implementation Plan to increase the safety and stability of the shelter by 2005 using international funds. So far, US$760 million has been allocated since the Shelter Implementation Plan began in 1998. The total clean-up cost to suppress dust at Chernobyl is estimated at over $3.1 billion by the Ukraine government.

Eurotech said in a statement Monday that the company is "in the final negotiation stages for agreements to use radiation resistant EKOR technology for nuclear waste encapsulation in the United States and Europe."

Kurchatov Research Holdings, Ltd. is a diversified technology holding company organized to identify, assess, acquire and commercialize technologies developed by scientists, engineers and research institutes worldwide.

---

A reluctant return to a nuclear nightmare
But the children of Chernobyl are healthier, happier after two months in Hinton

Diana Coulter, Journal Staff Writer The Edmonton Journal, September 11, 1999
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/stories/990911/2845263.html

What do you do with a rotten, old "zoobie" when you're thousands of miles from home?

Put it under your pillow and wait for the Tooth Fairy, of course.

That's one experience of Canadian childhood that nine-year-old Gala Zhuk plans to share with her friends when she returns home to Belarus, just north of Chernobyl.

She found two dollars under her pillow the morning after a Canadian dentist pulled her tooth -- zoobie in Russian. With the money, she bought a sucker and two candy necklaces, one for her big sister back home.

Zhuk is one of 11 children, ages 9 to 15, from Belarus who returned home Friday after spending almost two months with families in Hinton.

The kids were brought to Alberta by the Hinton Association for the Children of Chernobyl in the hope that time spent in a place with fresh air and safe food might reduce radiation levels in their bodies.

Medical experts have found after two months that children can cleanse their systems of about half of any radiation accumulated since the nuclear explosion in 1986.

Like most of the group, Zhuk was going back a little chubbier and feeling a lot better.

"Just look at this round Campbell's Soup chin," said Zhuk's host mother, Melissa Willick, as she gave Zhuk's face an affectionate squeeze.

Zhuk still suffers from stomach troubles. "Not a day goes by without a tummy ache," said Willick. "But she's definitely gained some weight."

The children also received dental care and eye exams. A couple were heading home with their first pair of glasses.

While donations paid most of the expenses, two families dipped into their own savings to bring two kids back for a second visit.

Gala Prokopchenko, 15, first came to Hinton when she was 10. Her host family, the Madsens, decided it was time for a reunion.

"I just tucked away my family allowance and once it amounted to enough, we brought Gala over," said Barbara Madsen.

Gala had been showing signs that she might be suffering from thyroid problems, often found in Chernobyl victims. But Canadian doctors examined her and found her OK.

Madsen is one of the original members of the group who brought Chernobyl children to Canada seven years ago.

But on Friday, she was giving goodbye hugs to her own three children. That's because she was boarding the plane with two other committee members. They plan to spend the next month in Belarus, hoping to track down and visit about 95 kids who have been to Hinton.

"We're just really eager to see how everybody is doing," said Madsen.

Tatiana Demianenko, a translator who accompanied the children from Belarus, said she's seen a big improvement in her young charges.

"We're just so thankful to these kind people who have given our children an opportunity for rest and recuperation," said Demianenko. "I know the children are looking forward to going home to their families, but I'm sure they will miss their families in Canada, too."

The Program

- Since it was formed in 1992, the Hinton Association for the Children of Chernobyl has brought nearly 100 children from the Chernobyl region to Hinton to for a brief respite from the radiation that spread over their homes after a 1986 nuclear explosion.

- It is funded by donations from local industries and the Independent Order of Foresters.

----------

RUSSIA - A Half Century of Nuclear Blasts
And the environmental fallout is just beginning

By Bill Powell, Newsweek International, September 13, 1999
Page 1 of 2 http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/int/eur/ov0611_1.htm
Page 2: http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/int/eur/ov0611_2.htm

Gulmira Azhakhmedova remembers the day almost 20 years ago when the authorities in her riverside village of Seitovka, just outside Astrakhan in southern Russia, told her to remove all the dishes from her shelves and go stand outside. She remembers how the ground shook and cracked underneath her feet. That was the first explosion, in 1980, "and no one knew what was happening then." But the blasts continued for four years - 15 in all - "and by the end we all knew what was going on," she says.

The government called it Project Vega. The idea was to create giant cavities in the ground where Gazprom, the state-owned gas company, could store huge quantities of the raw materials needed for an enormous condensate plant that was soon to be constructed. At the insistence of the Russian military, they found an atypical way to do it: by detonating nuclear bombs.

Events like that are more vivid in people's memories than ever: Aug. 29 marked the 50th anniversary of the first successful test of a nuclear device in the Soviet Union. Moscow's equivalent of the Manhattan Project - led by the legendary Igor V. Kurchatov, "the Russian Oppenheimer" - culminated in a 22-kiloton, aboveground explosion that destroyed homes as far as three miles from the testing site outside Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. Its success made the Soviet Union a superpower and ushered in the 40-year nuclear standoff between Washington and Moscow. Last week Kurchatov's heirs - Moscow's wistful nuclear establishment, now underfunded and unappreciated - gathered at the once secret city of Arzamas 16, 250 miles from Moscow, to commemorate the day the Soviets got the bomb.

For them the legacy of Kurchatov is one of power and pride. But then, the engineers don't live in Semipalatinsk or in Astrakhan or in the Arctic Circle region of Novaya Zemlya, three of the sites across the former Soviet Union where hundreds of nuclear tests occurred until 1990. Gulmira Azhakhmedova and her three children do. The 49-year-old schoolteacher has heard about the horrors of Semipalatinsk: a rate of birth defects in newborn children that rises year after year (81 per 100,000 births in 1988, 104 in 1996); rates of leukemia and cancer that are more than double the national average. Some 333,000 people were exposed to direct radiation from the tests in eastern Kazakhstan, and now their children live - and in some cases die - with that legacy.

No other region was as dramatically affected by the Soviet Union's aggressive testing policy as Semipalatinsk. But the growing concern in a smaller test site like Astrakhan shows just how widespread the program's environmental legacy may be. The government and Gazprom have repeatedly assured those living outside the plant that they do not need to worry about any fallout from Project Vega.

But the scheme to create the storage cavities did not go according to plan. The tanks themselves, constructed deep underground, were structurally flawed. According to Boris Golubov, head of biosphere research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, several were flooded with ground water. The result: a sort of radioactive brine that has been slowly seeping toward the surface - as well as toward the Caspian Sea and its rich aquatic life. "What were meant to be storage cavities for hydrocarbons instead became storage cavities for radioactive matter," says Golubov.

The extent of any radioactive contamination is unknown today. Are farm animals already munching on grass soaked in radioactive ground water? Russia's Minatom, which oversees the country's nuclear-energy plants as well as its weapons production, insists not. But scientists complain it has been very stingy with data to support its claim. Azhakhmedova, like most of the residents of Seitovka, doesn't want to stick around to see who's right, but at the moment she doesn't have a choice. Because of the rancid sulfurous fumes that the Gazprom plant has been spewing into the air since it opened in 1986, the company actually has been helping move people to a village it helped build farther away. But the process has been torturously slow, and Azhakhmedova's turn hasn't come yet. Nor does she have any idea when it will. "Why won't they get us out of here now," she says, "if there's even the slight chance of [radioactive] poisoning?" After all, "they came around to make sure our dishes didn't break 20 years ago."

With Steve LeVine in Semipalatinsk

-----------

Thieves Cripple Russian Nuclear Sub

The Associated Press M O S C O W, Sept. 10 1999
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/russiansub990910.html

- Thieves disabled a nuclear submarine in Russia's Northern Fleet by pilfering vital equipment, a newspaper reported Friday.

The Pantera nuclear-powered submarine, based near the city of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, was stripped of a filtration powder needed to clean air inside its hull, said the business daily Kommersant.

The sub's crew would have suffocated if the theft hadn't been discovered, the newspaper reported. "The crew was really lucky," it said.

One of the submarine's officers and an accomplice allegedly emptied 59 filtration cartridges of the powder, which contains the precious metal palladium, and replaced it with ordinary coal.

The suspects allegedly sold the powder for $9,000, and the damage to the submarine was estimated at $85,600, Kommersant said.

The swap was accidentally discovered by a newly-appointed officer, and the suspected thief, who had already been transferred to another sub, was arrested, Kommersant said.

According to the report, the accomplice was still on the run. Neither suspect was identified in the report.

Thefts of weapons and valuable equipment have become common in the demoralized and underfunded Russian military.

Last year, a naval officer stole and sold 58 gauges containing precious metals from a nuclear submarine of the Northern Fleet, and earlier this year a sailor stole crucial equipment controlling the nuclear reactor aboard another of the fleet's submarines.

---

Report: Russia Nuclear Sub Disabled

Friday, September 10, 1999; 9:38 a.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990910/V000883-091099-idx.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Thieves disabled a nuclear submarine in Russia's Northern Fleet by pilfering vital equipment, a newspaper reported Friday.

The Pantera nuclear-powered submarine, based near the city of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, was stripped of a filtration powder needed to clean air inside its hull, said the business daily Kommersant.

The sub's crew would have suffocated if the theft hadn't been discovered, the newspaper reported. ``The crew was really lucky,'' it said.

One of the submarine's officers and an accomplice allegedly emptied 59 filtration cartridges of the powder, which contains the precious metal palladium, and replaced it with ordinary coal.

The suspects allegedly sold the powder for $9,000, and the damage to the submarine was estimated at $85,600, Kommersant said.

The swap was accidentally discovered by a newly-appointed officer, and the suspected thief, who had already been transferred to another sub, was arrested, Kommersant said.

According to the report, the accomplice was still on the run. Neither suspect was identified in the report.

Thefts of weapons and valuable equipment have become common in the demoralized and underfunded Russian military.

Last year, a naval officer stole and sold 58 gauges containing precious metals from a nuclear submarine of the Northern Fleet, and earlier this year a sailor stole crucial equipment controlling the nuclear reactor aboard another of the fleet's submarines.

---

Russia Nuclear Waste Dump Reopens

Friday, September 10, 1999; 11:12 a.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990910/V000960-091099-idx.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- A nuclear waste dump, upgraded at the expense of the Norwegian government, reopened Friday as part of a program to help cash-strapped Russia dismantle its more than 100 aging submarines rusting in northern bases.

The dump in the town of Severodvinsk, home to a major submarine base of Russia's Northern Fleet, was built in the 1960s. The Norwegian Kvaerner Maritime company has modernized it, applying state-of-the art technologies.

Norway has spent $4.2 million to upgrade the storage facility in the city, which is located about 620 miles north of Moscow, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

The dump will now be able to accommodate 70,629 cubic feet of fluid nuclear waste, allowing the Navy to scrap six nuclear submarines a year, Alexander Dementyev, Kvaerner's project director, said.

Dementyev said that U.S. and Norwegian companies are now assembling equipment for recycling fluid waste into solid matter, which is safer and more suitable for dumping and recycling. The project is being financed by the U.S. Department of Defense, he said.

A dump for solid waste has already been constructed, and work now is under way to build a complex for unloading nuclear fuel from atomic submarines and special railway containers to carry waste to recycling and storage facilities, Dementyev said.

Norway has agreed to finance the fluid waste dump because of its long-standing concern about the nuclear risks posed by the decommissioned subs awaiting dismantling in Russian naval bases on the Kola Peninsula.

Russian officials have acknowledged that some of the submarines were decommissioned 25 years ago, and have languished dockside far longer than safety permits because the government hasn't been able to afford construction of adequate dismantling and storage facilities.

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Russia Wants to Store World's Radioactive Waste

By Ekaterina Chistiakova, Environmental News Service September 8, 1999
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/sep99/1999L-09-08-02.html

MOSCOW, Russia, September 8, 1999 (ENS) - Russia is working towards changing its laws so that the country can store spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste from other nations.

The State Duma and the Federation Council are discussing the bill On Industrial Storage and Treatment of spent nuclear fuel. They are seeking to change Article 50 (3) of the Law On Protection of the Environment in order to afford an opportunity to store and bury radioactive materials from other countries in Russia.

Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4 (Photo courtesy International Nuclear Safety Center, Russian Federation

The Ministry of Atomic Energy and the American Non-Proliferation Trust (NPT, Inc.) are developing plans for Russia's importing spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste for temporal storage and burial. In June, in contravention of existing Russian law, these organizations signed Protocol of Intentions providing for beginning of preparation for the construction of a 6,000 ton spent fuel storage facility.

On August 26, at the meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers, Deputy Minister of Atomic Energy, V. Ivanov, addressed the Russian government with the proposal to offer spent nuclear fuel storage and burial services on the world market to consolidate the federal budget and to improve the social and environmental situation in Russia.

However, from the bill On Industrial Storage and Treatment of Spent Nuclear Fuel it follows that the income from the storage of foreign spent nuclear fuel will go to some extra-budgetary fund to be invested in construction of new spent nuclear fuel treatment plants and development of the atomic industry.

The majority of the Russian public objects strongly to the arrival of nuclear waste in Russia. In this connection, a number of Russian environmental non-governmental organizations have forwarded letters of protest to President Boris Yeltsin, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Speaker of the State Duma Gennady Seleznev.

Balakovo Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 (Photo courtesy International Nuclear Safety Center, Russian Federation

In addition, a similar letter has been prepared for the United States governmental structures. Among the potential hazards pointed out are the poor condition of the Russian railways which have over 1,000 accidents per year, nuclear terrorism and embezzlement of fissile materials.

In terms of radioactive contamination Russia now ranks first in the world. Russian environmentalists believe that the almost catastrophic situation with Russia's own radioactive waste must not be aggravated by making available part of the Russian territory for burial of foreign waste.