Russian Environmentalists Urge to Think of Future of Nuclear Dumps

Oct 31 - BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union

Text of report by Russian NTV on 31 October

[Presenter Kirill Pozdnyakov] An expedition of the Russian Emergency Ministry has completed the survey of a large nuclear waste site where potentially hazardous objects were dumped off in the [Russia's northern] Kara Sea. Scientists have not observed any serious changes in radioactive situation there, however they said that sooner or later sea water will corrode the reinforced concrete. It is sufficient to start averting possible danger now. Our correspondent reports the details.

[Correspondent Denis Shuyiskiy] The Russian Professor Shtokman scientific vessel has spent over a month in the northern part of the Kara Sea. The largest nuclear waste dump site in the world is situated there next to the Novaya Zemlya Islands. Some nuclear weapons were tested here as well.

There are containers from a nuclear submarine and a nuclear reactor from the Lenin icebreaker underwater there. Different ministries are in charge of the deadly waste: military, power and transport ones. The purpose of the expedition set up by the Russian Emergency Ministry was to make an inventory of all the waste and evaluate its state. This time environmentalists have discovered 37 new potentially hazardous objects. Scientists say that this is insignificant amount from what could be found there.

[Maksim Vladimirov, senior officer of the Emergency Ministry's special assignment unit on carrying underwater works, captioned, standing in front of the region's map] All this has been sunk in 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when the attitude towards environment was quite different from what it is now. We believe that the time has come when these objects should be dealt with and the fact that they are hazardous should be confirmed.

[Correspondent over footage of Opensea TV] The sunken objects have different levels of protection from corrosion. According to engineers the casing of reactors has a guarantee of 300 years but it remains a mystery for how long containers sunk by military 40 years ago will last. This map shows possible areas of contamination in case the containers are destroyed - almost the entire Arctic Ocean may be contaminated by radioactive stuff.

Containers with toxic substance and poisons have remained in the Baltic Sea since the World War II. Hazardous areas of the sea are known but fishermen keep fishing in closed zones.

[Oleg Kuznetsov, chief expert of the Emergency Ministry's special assignment unit on carrying underwater works, captioned] When an underwater device is dropped one can see that fishermen have trawled for fish at the seabed. It happened many times that trawls picked containers with poisonous substance and people got poisoned.

[Correspondent] There are dozens of radioactive dumps in the Far East as well. One of them is 20 miles from Vladivostok.

[Kuznetsov] For example we discovered high level of radiation in squid. In the Okhotsk Sea we discovered the same in prawns.

[Correspondent] Environmentalists said that so far it happens only now and then. The expedition to the Kara Sea has not discovered any serious increase in radiation level at all. So far the casing has been keeping it inside. But only so far, as sooner or later salty sea water will corrode metal and concrete [of the containers] and even scientists have no idea what should be done then. At present they suggest at least monitoring the dumps sites. There are 17,000 such sites in Russia's coast waters.

[c/r 0830-1100] [Video shows a polar bear, the sea bottom, a sunken submarine, people taking test samples, a map of sunken objects]