28 June 2004 14:43
U.N. agency to push ahead with Russia nuke dump
The U.N. atomic agency will press ahead with plans to build the world's first global atomic waste dump in Russia to keep the dangerous material away from extremists, the agency's head said on Monday. Highly radioactive waste from power plants, which can be used to make an atom bomb, is currently put into temporary – and often poorly guarded – warehouses around the world.
There are no final repositories where the material can be stored for more than 10,000 years after which it would be harmless. "It's a very good thing for us. I'd like to push that as much as I can," Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
"If we can have a state-of-the-art repository here in Russia, that would be a major breakthrough ... They (the Russians) are, of course, very keen that we have a robust plan to combat possible nuclear terrorist attacks." Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, speaking alongside ElBaradei at a conference on Sunday, said Moscow fully supported the IAEA proposal. "Russia is the only country in the world where legislation allows to do that," he said.
Russia amended legislation in 2001 to allow spent nuclear imports. The project, which is likely to lead to a dump being built in the vast wastes of Siberia, could bring Moscow up to $20 billion in revenues in a decade, according to some estimates. But a source familiar with the project told Reuters it could take years before officials get down to actual construction. "The project is still pretty much in the making. It will take years, more than five years, before it's done," the source said.
Spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in water pools for up to four decades for its radioactivity and heat production to decline. After that, most countries plan to seal it in containers and dig it underground. "(The Russian facility) is not going to be the only one," ElBaradei said. "But at least this would be the first one which would be ready to accept foreign spent fuel." He said financing and other issues had yet to be finalised.
Russian ecologists have long protested against what they say would be turning Siberia into a giant dump for nuclear trash. "The most incredible thing is that such an immoral and criminal idea of turning Russia into a global nuclear waste dump found the support of the prime minister who clearly doesn't understand what horrors he is talking about," said Vladimir Slivyak, co-head of the Ecodefence environment group.
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