Nuclear waste in neighboring Russia vexes Norway

Nuclear waste in neighboring Russia vexes Norway

By Rolf Soderlind

OSLO (Reuter): When Russia and the Group of Seven industrialized states meet to discuss nuclear safety in Moscow on Friday, Norway will be anxiously watching their progress.

Although Norway is not attending the summit, the Scandinavian country shares a 200 km (125 miles) frontier with Russia in the Arctic, home to the giant nuclear submarine bases of the former Communist superpower.

These bases form an environmental rather than a military threat to NATO member Norway now that the Cold War is over.

Storage sites for spent fuel and other nuclear waste from vessels scrapped under disarmament agreements are inadequate and radiation could leak into the Barents Sea, experts say.

Cleaning up radioactive pollution on the neighboring Kola peninsula in northwestern Russia has become a major plank in Norwegian foreign policy.

"We are very happy about this summit because it offers a chance to draw attention to nuclear safety in northwestern Russia," Foreign Ministry State Secretary Siri Bjerke told Reuters.

She said Norway had been lobbying G7 members and Russia, including President Boris Yeltsin during his visit to Oslo last month, to move the nuclear problems of the Kola peninsula high on the Moscow agenda.

The leaders, including Yeltsin and U.S. President Bill Clinton, are expected to agree on a program to prevent illicit trafficking in nuclear materials as well as cooperation to dispose of plutonium no longer needed for defense purposes.

Ten years after the Chernobyl disaster released radiation across Europe, aging and unreliable reactors in the former Soviet bloc and the role of Western aid in avoiding another catastrophe are other topics.

Oslo's main concern, however, is the management, storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste from the Northern Fleet in Murmansk and other ports on the Kola.

Under a joint effort by Norway, Russia and the United States, a plant for treating low-level radioactive waste will be built this year in Murmansk.

Norway and other countries are also trying to assist Russia in dealing with the "Lepse", a ship used for storing spent nuclear fuel in Murmansk harbor.

Of all the troubled points on the Kola, the Andreeva Bay storage site has been singled out as among the worst by the government-backed Norwegian environmental group Bellona.

"The amount of radiation in this facility is several hundred times more than it was inside the reactor of Chernobyl," said a Bellona report on nuclear sites in the Zapadnaya Litsa fjord near Norway's border.

Cooperation has been clouded by Russia's espionage charge against Alexander Nikitin, a Russian environmentalist working for Bellona. A retired navy officer, he was arrested in February and could be executed if found guilty.

Nikitin co-authored a Bellona report accusing the Russian military of mishandling nuclear waste on the Kola and risking radioactive leakage into the sea. Bellona says the information he collated had been made public earlier.

In Oslo, Yeltsin reached an understanding with Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland on how to handle the case. Russia would drop complaints against Bellona. It would also grant Bellona's imprisoned Russian researcher the freedom, withheld so far, to choose his own lawyer.

Bjerke said Oslo hoped the summit's final declaration would refer to the safe disposal of nuclear waste, "because this is an area where the need for international effort is the greatest".

Norway feels that this topic has not attracted as much attention from the international community as the issue of nuclear safety at civilian nuclear power plants, she said.

The Kola civilian nuclear power plant on the northwest Russian peninsula has been named by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of the four most dangerous reactors in the world.

"The nuclear power plant is the other major threat," Bjerke acknowledged. "An accident at the Kola plant would be worse for Norway than Chernobyl because it is so close."

While Chernobyl is in Ukraine in central Europe, the Kola reactor is 200 km (125 miles) from the Norwegian border.

Russia has more than 80 operational nuclear submarines and two nuclear-powered cruisers stationed at bases on the Kola. In addition, at least 70 nuclear submarines have been scrapped, but spent nuclear fuel has been removed from only about 20, partly because of a lack of storage sites, Norway says.

For the past two years Norway has contributed an annual 130 million crowns ($20 million) to a scheme to help Russia improve nuclear safety and prevent contamination of the sea.

Removing waste on the Kola peninsula is an uphill battle against bureaucracy, military secrecy, and shortage of money. Norwegian officials estimate cleaning up all the environmental damage would cost several hundred billion crowns (tens of billions of dollars).

"If you think of all the costs it would take for a complete cleanup you would become a pessimist," Bjerke said. "But we have no alternative but to try and pressure the Russian authorities into a stronger commitment while at the same time seeking to mobilize international support.

"We have a long way to go," she said. "We can only hope that there won't be any major accidents in the meantime."