Before leaving Moscow, Yeltsin told journalists: "This city must be closed and this enterprise must also be shut down -- that much is clear. The only difficult matter is deciding what to do with the people."
But once he arrived in Siberia, the president said he had spoken wrongly, that it would be impossible to close either the city -- whose other, once-classified name is Zheleznogorsk -- or the factory.
The problem is that Zheleznogorsk not only separates weapons-grade plutonium, it also extracts ultra-pure rare-earth metals. Satellites -- including military ones -- are assembled there in an underground plant.
The city of 90,300 inhabitants is also home to Russia's main active storage site for spent nuclear fuel. If Zheleznogorsk were closed down, there would simply be no place to store spent nuclear fuel from Soviet-type reactors that continue to work in Russia and other former Soviet republics.
From Yeltsin's change of heart alone it is clear that the administration understands that the Nuclear Power Ministry, and especially its nuclear-weapons program, must be slimmed -- but it does not know how by how much.
In the past, the Soviet nuclear program was part of the Medium Machine Building Ministry, a name apparently intended to put Western spies off the trail. Today, there are about 730,000 people living in 10 closed cities once run by the Medium Machine Building Ministry. What is to happen to these cities?
Zheleznogorsk presents an additional problem. In accordance with the START-I and START-II agreements, as well as with the Bush-Gorbachev agreement on tactical nuclear weapons, several tens of thousands of Russian warheads are set to be dismantled. After these bombs and warheads are disposed of, there will remain more than 100 tons of leftover plutonium needing reliable underground storage.
Two years ago the U.S. Congress allocated $400 million to assist Russia in destroying parts of its nuclear arsenal. The Nuclear Power Ministry, headed by Viktor Mikhailov, wanted to spend the lion's share of this money constructing just such a storage facility. Yet at the same time, Zheleznogorsk continues to extract new weapons-grade plutonium -- something the U.S. and Russia agreed in June to stop doing.
Most likely, Yeltsin had this agreement in mind when he stated that "this city must be closed." However, the active reactor in Zheleznogorsk that is producing plutonium also provides heat and electricity to the entire city. It has now been announced that only around the year 2000 will Russia find the funds to shut down the reactor and replace it with an ordinary "commercial" reactor.
Highly placed sources in the Nuclear Power Ministry confirm that as long as the reactor is working, it is physically impossible to halt the extraction of plutonium since the special storage facilities in Zheleznogorsk are filled with nuclear fuel that contains weapons-grade plutonium.
"As long as we have not exchanged ratification documents with the Americans, we will continue extraction. We are not now in a position to break this technological chain," one source at the ministry said.
Meanwhile, it appears that Russia has signed yet another disarmament agreement that now is proving difficult to fulfill.
Pavel Felgenhauer is defense and national security editor for Segodnya.
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