March 01, 2006

Chernobyl: 20 Years On

The accident at Chernobyl was predicted three years before it happened.

A special inspection was carried out at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in 1983. At that time, Yevgeny Simonov and Yuri Laushkin, inspectors for Gosatomnadzor (State Oversight of Atomic Power), began issuing citations. They reported that there were a huge number of problems with the reactor type itself, that it was dangerous to work on, and that, sooner or later a serious accident would occur. But no one was listening. In fact, in 1986, after the explosion in the station’s reactor, Inspector Laushkin was one of the main defendants. He was convicted and sentenced to two years. He died in prison.

The fact that inspectors warned the leadership about the possibility of an accident at Chernobyl before it happened has only recently come to light. As to all of the other unpleasant and uncomfortable things that can be said about the Russian atomic energy industry? These hard realities, even to this day, 20 years after Chernobyl, are carefully ignored.

The Lessons of Chernobyl

Vladimir Kuznetsov is a former high-ranking official of Gosatomnadzor, the organization which until recently was responsible for monitoring the atomic industry in Russia and the former USSR. He took part in cleaning up the Chernobyl disaster and, in the process, received a serious dose of radiation.

Yet he was ruthlessly driven out of Gosatomnadzor when he tried to warn bureaucrats and the public about the horrific conditions in the Russian atomic industry. Today, Kuznetsov is the director for nuclear and radiation security at Green Cross, a non-profit organization founded by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl, Kuznetsov and his colleagues, including two professors and four doctors of science, published a detailed book about Chernobyl. It relates the story of Inspector Laushkin and many others whose fates directly impinged on the disaster. In the authors’ opinion, the accident was not caused by workers’ negligence, but by technical defects in the reactor’s construction [see box, page 45].

The Chernobyl-type reactor (a graphite-moderated reactor, known by its acronym, RBMK) is a design that American physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe has called “fundamentally faulty, having a built-in instability.” It is presently in use in European Russia at the Kursk, Leningrad and Smolensk Nuclear Power Stations. The Leningrad Power Station is located such that, if it had an accident, radioactivity would be disbursed throughout the Baltic Sea, across Finland, Sweden, Norway, Poland and Germany.

The Kola Nuclear Power Station, though not an RBMK reactor, has been plagued with operational problems and is currently working well beyond its normal service life.

Officials in the atomic industry provide assurances that all of the lessons of Chernobyl have been taken to heart. In the Rosatom Concern (previously Minatom), they say that the RBMK reactors have all been fitted with backup control systems, that the cores themselves have been modernized and that there is no reason for anxiety. Ecologists, however, say that modernizing such reactors is not possible.

The service life of the Leningrad reactor core was completed two years ago, but the station continues to run. In 2004, ecologists attempted to shut the station down with a lawsuit, but the Supreme Court denied their claim. “We have sent a claim to the court [of Human Rights] in Strasbourg,” said Kuznetsov, “but it has yet to be examined. There are a massive number of suits from Russia in Strasbourg right now, so we really don’t expect a rapid resolution of this issue.”

A “Chernobyl-style” reactor is not the only problem. Five reactors at various other atomic energy plants have come to the end of their service life, but there are no plans to shut the plants down. In fact, plant managers are doing everything possible to keep their enterprises afloat.

Only now are the scandalous details surrounding the construction of Saratov region’s Balakovsky Nuclear Power Station coming to light. The construction of a new reactor was begun in 1987. But, in 1993, a referendum was held on the reactor’s future. Some 70% of the region’s voters voted “no,” and construction was halted. That should have been that.

But it wasn’t. It turns out that the newly-elected governor of Saratov region is also the former head of the Balakovsky Station. Construction at Balakovsky has started up again, baldly ignoring public opinion. Significantly, over the past decade, the power plant’s stagnant construction site was not sealed up in any way. The unfinished buildings were exposed to the weather and it is easy to imagine its present condition.

Balakovsky’s construction plan was given governmental approval. Yet the plan does not accommodate the demands of experts from the Ministry for Extreme Situations, who said that the reactor needed to be built on a stabilizing platform, in consideration of the region’s seismic dangers. Instead, managers sought – and received – approval for a much less seismically stable platform, one that was more economical.

Learning of this, ecologists filed a complaint with the Minister of Extreme Situations himself, Sergei Shoygu. Significantly, the ecologists found out about the managers’ cost-cutting only accidentally; they were not officially admitted to sessions of the ministerial expert commission.

Storage Woes

The situation in Russia’s nuclear sector is all the more piquant because, despite dangerously aged reactors and seismically unstable stations, it cannot protect itself from threats from within. At many power stations there are not even the necessary technical means for proper transport of spent nuclear materials.

Non-profits constantly monitor the theft of radioactive substances from Rosatom enterprises. They also compile lists of accidents and incidents at atomic energy stations and affiliated enterprises. But evaluating the consequences of such extreme situations is quite difficult, since they are not investigated.

For example, in 2003, at a factory of one of the country’s largest nuclear enterprises – the Mayak Industrial Complex in Chelyabinsk region – there was a radioactive emission.

And still earlier, in 2000, the complex had its electricity cut off for a full hour and half, which is the sort of thing that can lead to an accident similar to what occurred at Chernobyl. The Ural Interregional Territorial District Office of Gosatomnadzor asked the prosecutor’s office of Chelyabinsk region to conduct an investigation of this event. But the prosecutor’s office, when it considered the request, decided against filing criminal charges, since “harmful consequences” were not proven.

Meanwhile, in early 2002, State Duma Deputy Alexei Mitrokhin and his aides decided to carry out an “unsanctioned territorial penetration” of a nuclear waste disposal site at a Minatom enterprise – the Zheleznogorsky Mining-Chemical Industrial Complex near Krasnoyarsk, another of Russia’s largest facilities. The intent was to show how defenseless such enterprises are. Mitrokhin and his people were able to pass unhindered into the power station. The “penetration” was caught on film by a journalist’s video camera.

Almost a year later, employees of the Federal Security Service (FSB) conducted their own series of “experiments” at this very same site. They secretly planted fake explosive devices next to and inside the plant. And not only were they able to do this completely unhindered, but their devices lay at the plant undisturbed for a month. They had to be removed by the FSB operatives themselves, who then announced the results of their experiment. It was a huge scandal, but the press furor quickly died down.

Finally, there is yet one more open secret: the storage site for decommissioned Soviet nuclear warheads, which is already partially constructed near the Mayak Industrial Complex. The facility is a joint project of Rosatom and the Ministry of Defense and its construction was begun at the end of the 1990s. Some 400 tons of military uranium and plutonium are to be housed here.

The project, which is not stamped “secret,” was nonetheless kept secret from specialists, contractors and representatives. State ecological organizations were excluded from participation in the project’s evaluation. State Duma deputies repeatedly requested involvement in the evaluation as well as information on the project, in their capacity as representatives of the people, but they never received any response.

The atomic managers only said that everything was in order with the project: “The degree of security at the Chelyabinsk storage site meets all international standards and exceeds those at all analogous facilities existing in the world today” (From the transcript of a March 2003 speech to the State Duma by then Minister for Atomic Energy Alexander Rumyantsev).

But everything was not in order. When documentation “leaked” through the walls of Rosatom, some incredible details were revealed.

Lev Maximov is a world famous scientist who, for more than 20 years was the leading physicist at the Novosibirsk Factory for Chemical Concentrates. Among other things, he developed technical specifications for security in the nuclear industry. According to the plan for the Chelyabinsk site, Maximov said, all of the military uranium and plutonium from Soviet nuclear warheads will be concentrated in one warehouse. Yet no country in the world concentrates all of its strategic nuclear reserves in one site.

The plutonium and uranium, Maximov continued, are to be secured in some 25,000 special containers, which are to be produced in the U.S. Some of these containers are already finished, have been shipped to Russia and are now at the Mayak facility. The containers were designed jointly by Russian and American specialists. But apparently the blueprints for the containers were not made available to Russian intelligence services. According to Maximov, back when there were plans to put the warehousing facility in Tomsk, the head of the local military district’s FSB requested these blueprints from his department head and was sacked.

Building an underground warehouse for this quantity of nuclear waste is an extremely expensive luxury. So it was decided to build it above ground, covering it with a special concrete. According to technical specifications, the “special concrete” is capable of withstanding the impact of a 20 ton airplane flying at 200 meters per second.

The only problem is that all of modern Russia’s passenger planes are heavier and faster than this: for example, the Il-86 (take-off weight 167 tons, cruising speed 850 km/hour, or 236 meters per second), the Tu-154 (100 tons, 860 km/h), or the smallest Russian passenger plan, the Tu-134 (47 tons, 820 km/h), to say nothing of various Boeing aircraft which ply Russian skies.

In other words, the storage site could not withstand the impact of any modern passenger airplane. A scary reality when one considers the potential consequences borne by a massive explosion of what once was the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Apparently, all of these specifications are in line with lowering the project’s costs. And, in order that the public did not become alarmed, the facts were concealed. Yet, even when everything floated to the surface, nothing changed. The prosecutor’s office was apparently uninterested in these details and construction of the storage site continues.

How many similar secrets are hidden at other Russian atomic industry sites, no one can say for certain.

Atomic Guinea Pigs.

Another rather surprising story is linked to the Mayak Complex. Even now, it is little known beyond the bounds of Chelyabinsk region. It turns out that for more than half a century a massive experiment has been going on in the area surrounding the Mayak Complex. People who lived within the factory’s area of activity were not moved, but were left to live in this area, and officials have been observing them, monitoring their health and lives.

Construction began on Mayak in 1949, when the effects of radiation on humans was largely unknown. Within two years, residents of surrounding villages began to complain of health problems. This information was transmitted to Moscow and scientists were dispatched to the region to study the situation. In 1953 and again in 1962, special affiliates of the Russian Institute of Biophysics were opened here, where scientists carried out observations.

Two categories of people inhabit the area around Mayak: factory workers and local residents. As to the former, some of the Soviet Union’s finest scientists and specialists were brought to live in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-65 [now known as Ozersk]. They were paid huge salaries and lived in the best conditions available to private citizens in the Soviet era. But the cost was high: they were forbidden from traveling outside the closed city and from meeting with relatives who lived elsewhere. They were cut off from the rest of the world, yet they became accustomed to this lifestyle. During the Khrushchev era, when Chelyabinsk-65 was opened up, few of them chose to leave.

The story of local villagers living along the river Techa, a tributary of the Ob river that abuts Mayak, is quite different.

They simply lived here, giving no thought to the secrets of this dangerous enterprise: they drank the water, fished, put their cattle out to graze in the fields. In 1959, the Soviet government issued a decree calling for voluntary relocation, but the villagers stayed. Some never read the decree, some did not believe there was something called radiation, and for most all, there was simply nowhere else to go.

Local residents received the largest doses of radiation during Mayak’s first years of operation, especially during several accidents at the end of the 1950s. From 1949-1951, the plant pumped its waste into the Techa river, figuring it would be diluted by the flowing water. But the waste settled into the riverbed instead. When, in 1951, scientists discovered radiation had flowed 1,000 miles down the Ob to the Arctic Sea, the decision was made to dump the plant’s wastes into Lake Karachay instead.

The lake quickly became hyper-contaminated. Even though it was fenced off, villagers scrambled over and through the fence, in order to swim and fish in its clear waters. By the early 1990s, one specialist reported that standing on the banks of the Karachay for an hour without suitable protection would lead to a lethal dose of radiation.

In 1953, storage of Mayak’s highly-radioactive waste was moved to underground concrete-lined steel containers. But in 1957 one of the containers in this bunker exploded, contaminating a 100-mile stretch of land between Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, forcing the evacuation of 10,000 and reportedly filling regional hospitals to capacity for two years. As if the situation could not get worse, waste later began to be stored in a series of unmonitored trenches stretching over a 40 square kilometer area and emitting radioactivity levels estimated at 20 times that of the Chernobyl disaster. Not surprisingly, today this is widely considered to be the most polluted place on earth.

At the beginning of the 1990s, international cooperation began in the sphere of nuclear energy. American specialists arrived at Mayak and were simply astonished with what they found, aside from the expected environmental degradation.

Throughout the half century of atomic energy’s history, scientists had discussed “acceptable norms” for radiation exposure based on data from the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or from the Chernobyl disaster. But investigators at the Institute of Biophysics had, for decades, been collecting data on the health of everyone living alongside Mayak – on the pathologies of adults and children at various stages of different diseases and illnesses.

To this day, this is the only data that allows scientists to draw conclusions about how the human organism reacts, genetically and otherwise, to constant exposure to small doses of radiation.

Russian scientists were thus the first to describe Chronic Radiation Sickness and formulated recommendations for doctors, particularly oncologists.

This information is entirely official data, and was conveyed to this reporter several years ago by Mikhail Kiselyov, at that time the deputy director for administration of medical-biological and experimental problems in the Russian Ministry of Health, where information about all extreme human health hazards is collected.

Foreigners who have been collaborating with Chelyabinsk scientists over the past decade are working to safeguard this information as if their lives depended on it. They are financing projects to digitize the information and provide local facilities with useful technology. To these scientists, the main thing is that this information, which is invaluable for humankind, does not get lost.

Ecologists, meanwhile, accuse the atomic industry of conducting radical experiments on human beings. “The fact that this experiment was acknowledged and still allowed to continue, is amoral,” said Vladimir Chuprov, coordinator of the energy department at Greenpeace Russia. “They should either have gotten people’s explicit approval to take part in the experiment, or have moved them from this place.”

Scientists deny the accusation. Kiselyov said he is certain that any rise in the incidence of cancers connected with radiation exposure occurred only among those who worked at Mayak in its first decade. Any genetic mutations among villagers, he said, was the result of the social-economic and demographic situations prevailing in this region. In other words, due to the plagues of village life: alcoholism and intermarriage.

Area residents, meanwhile, stay put. Scientists and villagers alike have no desire to leave. According to a special poll on this question, conducted by independent local sociologists in 2002, some 80% of the residents of Chelyabinsk region want to remain where they are.

Back to the Future

In May of 2006 there will be an international tender for a project to clean up the territory encircling Mayak. For the first time in history, a Russian nuclear complex will conduct an environmental cleanup with the collaboration of domestic and international entities. And the appraisal is being conducted openly and publicly. Rosatom is spending 10-12 million rubles on the conduct of the tender alone.

Local ecologists are breathing more easily. Nadezhda Kutepova, head of the Chelyabinsk ecological organization Planet of Hopes (Planeta Nadezhd) which, under the previous atomic energy minister, was investigated by the FSB on charges of espionage, now meets personally with the new head of the Atomic Energy Agency, Sergei Kiriyenko. And the FSB has cleared her organization of any wrongdoing. The Russian atomic lobby thus claims it has become more democratic and open.

To understand the reasons for this sudden change, we interviewed Vladimir Slivyak, a well-known Russian ecologist and co-chair of Ecozashchita (Ecodefense), Russia’s largest public organization, which has many large regional affiliates and which has carried out protests near atomic stations all across Russia.

Russian Life: Do you really expect some kind of change?

Vladimir Slivyak: Of course, I understand that this is all just the appearance of democracy. This situation has arisen because our atomic industry does not today have any money to develop itself. If it had money, there would be true madness. All of Rosatom’s plans would be brought to fruition, and they would once again try to hide all their dangerous activities from the public.

On the one hand, this situation is advantageous, because ecologists and public organizations can at least have some idea about what is going on in Rosatom’s enterprises. But, on the other hand, it means that real change in the industry – reconstruction and modernization of factories and power stations – cannot be expected.

RL: What do you mean by “no money”? The present conception of the atomic industry prioritizes a number of export opportunities: sale of technology, providing services for the processing and storage of spent nuclear fuel.

VS: The problem of import to Russia of expended fuel from nuclear power stations was until recently our country’s main ecological threat. Waste from our own domestic production is presently held in storehouses at the power stations themselves, and these storehouses are almost full. Despite this, Rosatom plans to bring foreign wastes into the country. Starting in 2001, over the ensuing 10 years, they planned to earn some 20 billion dollars on this. A not insignificant amount of waste has already been imported, but now the main contractors don’t want to work with Russia any more.

It has to do with a special directive of the European Union, forbidding EU members from sending their waste materials to non-EU countries if the receiving country’s level of nuclear security is lower than in Europe. No one has done a special calculation, but even a rough approximation shows that the norms are lower in Russia.

Even Hungary and Bulgaria, which are especially interested in collaborating with Russia, have refused. Before Russia put forward this initiative to store foreign nuclear wastes, they had both worked out their own plans for dealing with their waste. At first they were fascinated with the Russian proposal, but now their fascination has diminished, and these countries have returned to their own original plans.

RL: So the ecological problem of foreign waste has been settled?

VS: According to information which I have received from the U.S. Department of Energy, a secret agreement is being prepared between our atomic industry and its U.S. counterpart. It is an agreement on nuclear cooperation to be signed in exchange for Russia’s refusal to help Iran with its nuclear program.

We are talking not just about stopping work on the construction of Iran’s Busher nuclear power plant and refraining from the supply of nuclear fuel, but in general the refusal to export various types of arms, including rockets. American politicians already feel there is progress, insofar as Russia has proposed to conduct the enrichment of uranium for Iran’s nuclear program on Russian soil, and therefore plans are being developed for deeper cooperation on Iran. The negotiation process with Russia on nuclear cooperation is therefore seen in the U.S. administration as a way to keep nuclear materials from flowing to Iran for a long time, if not for good.

If such an agreement is reached, then the U.S. may export wastes to Russia that are currently under U.S. control. These are concentrated in Asia (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan) and several European countries.

They comprise some 80% of the world’s accumulated wastes. Therefore, we still have a chance of becoming the world’s nuclear waste dump. Considering how our atomic sites are taken care of, this is a threat to all Eurasia. Truth be told, officials in the U.S. are presently refusing to comment on this information.

RL: But are there not other export projects?

VS: Of course. [Atomic Agency Head] Sergei Kiriyenko is generally well known as an enthusiast of international cooperation. And now foreign contracts are actively moving forward with Iran and also with China. But even that plan, in the near term, has turned out to be non-monetary.

Very few developed countries are presently building atomic energy stations. Only developing countries need atomic stations. But they can’t afford to build them. Our atomic technicians will work for free in developing nations, in consideration of merely political advantage, and be paid from the Russian state budget – in other words paid for by taxpayers – and the budget will write these costs off as state debt.

Which can later be written off altogether. Only Iran will pay cash. This has been confirmed by Russian supervisors of the Iran deal. Yet, actually, that is a closed project and it is impossible to verify anything. But if sanctions are imposed on Iran, then Russia’s atomic industry will lose huge profits planned from the sale of nuclear material to Iran. If this comes to pass, for all practical purposes the export trade idea completely collapses.

RL: So it turns out that there is no money for reconstruction of our power stations, nor for transferring our essentially unprotected, ecologically dangerous nuclear wastes to another location?

VS: Correct. In the Soviet era, everything was simple: economics was subordinated to politics and all foreign projects, just like the upkeep of the atomic sector, in principle were financed by the State.

But then the Soviet Union collapsed. Since that time, there has not been any kind of nuclear policy: the industry did not know how to take care of itself. One should justly note that a development plan of sorts was worked out by former minister and now scandal-infamous Yevgeny Adamov. He led the post-Soviet atomic industry through the end of the difficult 1990s, but goals and priorities were set. But we shouldn’t count Iran in this, as it was a priority even in the Soviet period. Still, this conception was not prepared by economists, but by atomic industry policymakers. Therefore our politics, as before, did not take economics into consideration.

The atomic policymakers’ task was to get the train on the rails of a market economy. But how one does that in this sphere? No one knows. To this day, the Russian atomic industry consumes huge budget resources and is not capable of taking care of itself in an orderly, clean way. In that sense, everything is just as it was in the USSR.

Instead of a Post Script

As this story was going to press, President Vladimir Putin and Sergei Kiriyenko both declared that the Russian nuclear industry needs to be expanded (indeed that Russia could become a center for international nuclear enrichment programs). Kiriyenko said Russia should build a 40 more reactors (two per year, starting in 2010), so that nuclear power can produce 25% of the nation’s power (vs. 17% today). No mention was made, however, about any need to first clean up problems at Russia’s existing 31 reactors, or to make the nuclear power complex environmentally safer or more secure. RL

March 01, 2006

Chernobyl: 20 Years On

See Also

Anatomy of Chernobyl's meltdown

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