OSINFO - Open Sources Information

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia | If I were an engine driver on a freight train, I would certainly like to know the nature of the cargo I was responsible for. And I would have thought that this kind of information was by no means considered classified in Russia, if I had not spoken to members of an environmental pressure group at a street protest in St. Petersburg a few days ago.

Local environmentalists took to the streets to inform locals that St. Petersburg is becoming a frequent point of arrival for foreign ships with radioactive material on board.

Cargo containing radioactive material passes through the city's port at least 10 times a month. Having arrived by sea, the nuclear loads are then loaded on trains for shipment to treatment facilities in the Urals and Siberia.

City authorities remain tight-lipped about the practice, while the number of these loads looks set to grow at a fast pace. St. Petersburg is currently the only Russian port used for handling radioactive material, according to the Bellona environmental group and local Greenpeace activists. As this column was being written on 30 January, four people, including two Bellona activists, were briefly detained by police near the city during a protest against the import of uranium tailings from Germany.

Russia recently signed contracts with India, Pakistan and China to receive spent nuclear fuel and highly toxic uranium hexafluoride in addition to the regular shipments of radioactive cargoes from Western Europe.

Russian environmental organizations complain they are not officially informed about the nuclear traffic and typically hear of new shipments of radioactive waste only from their foreign counterparts. And when volunteers find out about a particular load and check the containers for radiation levels, they often find the containers unattended.

Train engine drivers do not receive any extra training in carrying hazardous loads and are even denied access to information about the cargo they are pulling because the Russian authorities would rather keep such information under wraps. Officials believe it would be safer not to inform the public, ostensibly to avoid widespread panic.

"Ordinary people have to be prepared to deal with this subject," said Maria Rozhdestvina, an aide to the Leningrad region prosecutor responsible for investigating environmental crimes. "Pouring out information to the general public who know nothing about the subject would simply stir groundless mass hysteria."

Germany stopped shipments of nuclear waste on the country’s rails in 1998 because of safety fears. Although the shipments resumed three years later, anti-nuclear campaigners still sometimes try to stop them. But public awareness remains in an embryonic state in Russia as even environmental groups can get precious little information related to the safety level of the nuclear industry in Russia.

NO NEED TO KNOW

Olga Tsepilova, deputy head of the environmental faction of the liberal party Yabloko and an environmental scientist with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said the independent safety monitoring of Russia's nuclear facilities is being complicated by the country's security services.

In 2004 the scientist herself faced espionage charges as she tried to collect materials for a dissertation on Russia's nuclear cities.

Although Tsepilova was a scientist working legally on her dissertation, she was denied access to a nuclear facility at Ozersk, a town in the Urals.

"The nuclear industry in Russia is highly corrupt, but tracing the misappropriation of money is very complicated bearing in mind that external control is restricted,” Tsepilova said. "Outsiders can merely compare the slow tempo of construction of new nuclear facilities with the record speed with which nuclear bosses are building luxurious mansions for themselves and their families."

Tsepilova's attempts to investigate and track down the cash flows resulted in a criminal case against her.

Some at the protest in St. Petersburg said they would have moved house had they known they were living next to the transport arteries that see frequent movement of radioactive materials. And the soothing speeches by the authorities about the safety of such traffic are the last thing they need to make a decision. The public needs facts rather than highly subjective opinions. But access to the facts is restricted.

More importantly, the rosy picture of nuclear safety in Russia drawn by the authorities clashes dramatically with reports by environmentalists.

In July 2006, members of the local branch of Greenpeace said they measured unsafe levels of radioactivity originating from six containers loaded on trains at Kapitolovo station on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Radioactive shipments always transit through this station, but the wagons were unguarded.

"This kind of transport would make a perfect gift for terrorists, both in the sense of accessibility of radioactive material and as a very vulnerable potential object for attack," Dmitry Artamonov, head of the local Greenpeace branch, said at the time. Two months earlier, members of the group found 37 rail containers marked "radioactive material" sitting on the tracks at Kapitolovo.

In February 2001, a container was impounded by customs officials at the main airport in Yekaterinburg because it was emitting radiation well over the accepted safety level.

That container had arrived from the United States on a San Francisco-to-Yekaterinburg cargo flight. The airport’s spokesperson said the empty container was bound for the Energotechnical Research and Construction Institute in the town of Zarechny, near Yekaterinburg and close to the Beloyarsk nuclear power station.

The institute regularly exports various radioactive materials and had sent some to a U.S. organization that had ordered them, which in turn had sent the container back without cleansing it of radiation.

Vladimir Slivyak of the Russian environmental organization Ecodefense said a recent investigation by his group turned up several instances where trains carrying radioactive material did not display the mandatory warning signs.

"Besides, Russian railways aren't immune to traffic accidents," Slivyak said. "On a recent occasion, a bridge under construction fell on a passing train. Luckily, the train wasn't carrying uranium."

In the meantime, Russia's mishandling of its own nuclear waste is inexcusable. One of the most notorious examples is Karachai Lake in the Chelyabinsk area, which although situated only 4 kilometers from the nearest village, is full of nuclear waste. The cancer rate in the region is at least 2.5 times higher than the national average.

Russian storage facilities currently hold about 700,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 100,000 tons of it imported.

The time has come for international organizations to call for independent monitoring and introduce greater international responsibility in this sphere. Lax safety procedures and St. Petersburg's location on the Baltic coast make for a dangerous combination.

If a leak or any other accident occurs, it won't be just Russians who suffer.