Ministry Needs 'Trillions' For Nuclear Clean-Up

Top officials in ministries that use nuclear technology said Tuesday that the storage of radioactive waste in Russia was in critical condition and bemoaned the new state budget's failure to offer relief."Even if we stop all nuclear production now, it will take trillions of rubles to process the radioactive waste we've got now," said Yury Vishnevsky, the head of Gosatomnadzor, the ministry overseeing the safety of Russia's nuclear installations. "And we have to do it, otherwise the waste will spread all around and poison everything."He was speaking at a hearing organized by the State Duma's ecology committee. The Duma is scheduled to consider a package of ecology bills this summer, including a draft law on the storage of nuclear waste.Vishnevsky said much of the waste produced by Russia's nuclear power plants cannot be reused, as is common practice in the West, because there is no technology to reprocess waste from the 16 Chernobyl-type reactors which make up more than half of all reactors in Russia.Much of the waste was sunk in the seas of the Russian Far East by the Soviet navy. Sergei Grigorov, head of the Russian Defense Ministry's ecology directorate, said it was considered safe until 1987 to dump the waste into the sea.The dumping continues even now, though it is contrary to the 1972 London Convention on nuclear waste. Grigorov argued that it was an emergency measure, since the tankers the navy uses to dump the waste are outdated and unsafe."They've taken such bad care of the tankers that if they don't dump, the waste will leak out by itself," Vishnevsky said. "But then, I can't blame the Defense Ministry. We've all taken such bad care of the entire country."