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."