By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
On May 11, 2005, Romania will host a two-day exercise simulating a
nuclear accident. It will be conducted at the Cernavoda nuclear
power plant. But the real radiological emergency is already at hand
and unfolding.
Nuclear waste is both an environmental problem and an economic
solution in the countries of east Europe and central Asia.
Kazakhstan announced in November 2002 that it plans to import other
countries' nuclear waste - and get paid for its shoddy disposal-by-
burial, contrary to international conventions.
Ironically, the money thus generated is earmarked for ridding of
Kazakhstan of its own pile of fissionable trash. This emulates a
similar scheme floated five years ago in Russia. The Atomic Energy
Ministry planned to import 20,000 tons of nuclear waste to earn $21
billion in the process.
The collapse of the Warsaw Pact left many countries in the former
Soviet block with an ageing and prohibitively expensive to maintain
nuclear arsenal. Dismantling the war heads - often with American and
European Union Euratom funding - yielded mounds of lethal
radioactive materials.
Abandoned nuclear test sites - such as the USSR's central facility
in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan - contain thousands of tons of
radioactive leftovers. Add to this the network of decrepit,
Chernobyl-like, reactors strewn throughout the region and their
refuse and the gargantuan dimensions of the threat emerge.
Take, again, Kazakhstan. According to Mukhtar Dzakishev, then
president of Kazatomprom, the country's national nuclear agency, the
country is immersed in 230,000 tons of waste. It would cost more
than $1 billion to clean. The country should earn this amount in a
single year of imports of nuclear litter.
The going rate in Europe is c. $3-5000 per 200-liter barrel, only a
fifth of which is spent on its burial in old mines or specially
constructed depositories. This translates to a profit of $80-140 per
cubic meter of uranium buried - compared to less than $10 per cubic
meter of uranium extracted. The countries of east Europe have
entered the fray with relish. In 2001, president Putin rushed
through the Duma a much-debated law that allows for the importation
and disposal of nuclear waste.
Getting rid of nuclear waste and dismantling nuclear facilities -
both military and peacetime - do not come cheap.
According to the ELTA news agency, Lithuania's decommissioning of
the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant would require 30 years and should
cost $90 million in 2008 alone. In October 2002, Russia's Atomic
Energy Minister Yevgeny Adamov pegged the cost of a USA-Russian
agreement to dispose of 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium at $750
million. Russia plans to resell the end product, mixed oxide (MOX),
to various countries in Europe and to Japan. MOX can be used to fuel
specially-fitted power plants.
The European Commissions, alarmed by these developments in its
backyard, announced, according to EUObserver.com, that it "gives
priority to geological burial of dangerous material as the safest
disposal method to date. Member states will be required to establish
national burial sites for the disposal of radioactive waste by 2018.
Research for waste management will also be stepped up."
Even private NGO's got into the act. In August 2002, Russia
reclaimed from the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Belgrade,
Yugoslavia 45 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. The Nuclear
Threat Initiative (NTI), a Washington-based NGO established by Ted
Turner of CNN fame and former Senator Sam Nunn, was instrumental in
arranging the air transport of the sensitive substance. According to
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Vinca Institute conditioned its
surrender of the uranium rods on financial aid to dispose of 2.5
tons of spent nuclear fuel. NTI provided the $5 million needed to
accomplish the cleanup.
A donor conference, in the framework of the Northern Dimension
Environmental partnership (NDEP) pledged in November 2002 c. $110
million to tackle environmental and nuclear waste in northwest
Russia. This fund will supplement loans from international financial
institutions. Yet, according to the BBC, of the twelve priority
projects worth $1.3 billion that have been agreed - not one concerns
atomic trash.
The NDEP, set up in 1997, is a partnership of the European
Commission, Russia, the European Regional Development Bank, the
European Investment Bank, the Nordic Bank and the World Bank. But it
is predicated on a crucial document - the Multilateral Nuclear
Environment Programme in Russia (MNEPR) - which Russia for long
evaded signing.
The sorry state of underfunded efforts to cope with the aftermath of
nuclear power and weaponry and the blatant venality that often
accompanies shady waste deals provoked a green backlash throughout
the otherwise docile region. The Guardian quoted courageous Kazakh
environmental activists as saying:
"The same is repeated again and again. It is just another money-
making venture ... The World Bank is worried about corruption in
Kazakhstan. In our current situation there is no guarantee of public
safety, no system for compensation, no confidence in the ability of
customs to deal with these cargoes. Everyone has a human right to a
safe environment - but apparently not here."
Similar sentiments are expressed by groups in Russia, Romania,
Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Poland and
elsewhere. Being "environmentally correct" is so important that
Tanjug, the Yugoslav news agency, in its relentless campaign against
NATO, implausibly accused Germany of storing its waste in the mines
of Kosovo.
A prime example of activism involved a Russian scientific expedition
which found a nuclear submarine dumped, with spent radioactive fuel,
in the northern Kara Sea. According to news agencies, quoting
environmental groups, dumping nuclear waste, hundreds of submarines
and decommissioned nuclear reactors into Arctic waters was common
practice in the Soviet Union.
In late 2002, the governor of the Murmansk region, bordering on
Norway, has announced a 6-year cleansing program of the Kola
peninsula, designed to assuage the worried Scandinavians. The
Norwegians built a waste recycling facility in the area, constructed
a special train to ferry the waste away and invested in renovating a
storage dump.
Many east European countries do not store nuclear waste but serve
merely as transit routes. The waste the Kazakhs plan to dispose of,
for instance, should cross Russian territory. Yet, the Russians are
the easy part. In 1998, they have agreed to continue to store in
east Siberia fission by-products from Bulgaria's controversial
Soviet-built Kozloduy nuclear power plant. Russia also stores waste
from Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Lithuania. Waste
disposal was part of the standard construction contracts of Soviet
reactors abroad.
But getting the waste to Russia often requires permission from
other, a lot less forthcoming, countries such as Moldova, Ukraine
and Romania. By the beginning of 2003, according to the Bulgarian
reactor's management, the old storage pits were exhausted and the
plant had to close down.
According to the Regional Environmental Center, the transit
countries cite ill-equipped railways, antiquated containers and
other environmental concerns as the reasons for their reluctance. In
reality, they are under pressure by the European Union and the USA
to collaborate with waste transport and disposal companies in the
West, such as British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), or Cogema. In the
wastelands that constitute large swathes of the post-communist
world, nuclear waste, it seems, is a growth industry.
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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International
(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health
and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and
Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com