"Anti-Nuclear Resistance"

Two of the world’s worst nuclear accidents occurred on the territory of the former Soviet Union: the 1957 accident at the Mayak facility in Siberia and of course the tragic Chernobyl accident in 1986 in present day Ukraine. To this day, dealing with the consequences of these accidents are a drain on the state budget. Moreover, the severe economic depression of the past 10 years and the consequent plunge in government revenues has ham-strung government efforts to properly control nuclear materials, increasing both the likelihood of another accident, and the threat of dangerous nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a whopping 93.5% of the population and countless environmental and other non-governmental organizations have voiced their opposition to the government’s plan to import spent nuclear fuel.

This is why it is difficult to understand the plans of Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy (Min-Atom) to import, store and reprocess “spent nuclear fuel.”

Money is of course the answer. This story begins in 1999, when the Non-Proliferation Trust (NPT), an American non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary in the Bermudas, proposed the following deal to the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy: in return for importing and storing nuclear waste, which is for the most part located in Europe and East Asia, the Russia government will receive billions of dollars which could be used to fund disarmament, further development in their civilian nuclear power complex, and the cleaning up of irradiated and/or polluted areas. Though article 50 of the Russian Law on “Environmental Protection” prohibits the importation of nuclear waste, the Ministry of Atomic Energy agreed to the deal, and in April 2000 submitted an amendment to the above named law that would allow the plan to go forward. There was naturally a vociferous and decisive negative reaction on the part of Russian society and the Russian environmental movement to this bill. Because of this reaction, and because of the broad language in Min-Atom’s bill, the Duma, the lower chamber of Russia’s parliament, rejected Min-Atom’s proposals. 

Learning from their mistakes, the Ministry of Atomic Energy fine-tuned their plans, tightened up the language in their proposals, and in July of 2000 submitted a new packet of bills that would allow a revised project to go forward: a law on “Special Ecological Problems on the Environmental Rehabilitation of Radioactively-Polluted Regions of the Russian Federation, Financed from Revenue from International Trade in Radioactive Nuclear Fuel,” and amendments to the law on “The Use of Nuclear Energy,” and to the law on “Environmental Protection.” Instead of allowing the import of “nuclear waste” (yadernie otkhodi) as Min-Atom’s original proposal allowed, this packet of bills would only permit the import of “spent nuclear fuel” (otrabotovshoe or obluchyennoe yadernoe toplivo). With the semantical changes came changes in Min-Atom’s plan for these imports. According to the present plan, not only is Russia to receive money for importing and storing this “spent nuclear fuel”--20,000 tones of which they plan to import--but Min-Atom eventually intends to reprocess it in order to make plutonium and uranium for commercial reactors, a process which will of course create the nuclear waste the Duma had forbidden Min-Atom from importing back in April. Nevertheless, this bill attracted the support of a majority of deputies in the Duma and was scheduled to be approved on November 22, 2000. 

The Duma decided to wait, however, on the results of the Central Elections Commission’s (CEC) certification of a petition for a referendum which would put the question of importing nuclear waste before the people. Russia environmentalists had been busy in 2000 gathering the constitutionally required 2 million signatures needed to petition the state for a referendum. In fact, they gathered 2.5 million signatures, but at the end of November the CEC declared 700,000 of the signatures invalid, thereby suspending the whole process and placing the future of the referendum in doubt. (This matter is currently being disputed in the courts.) No longer worried about the political consequences of approving extremely unpopular bills at the same time that a referendum, which would most likely overturn these very same bills, was announced, the Duma on December 21 finally and overwhelmingly approved Min-Atom’s packet of bills. 

According to Russian parliamentary procedure the first reading or vote concerns only the general concept of the bill, while the second reading—which for this packet of bills was originally scheduled for February 22, but has since been postponed until March 22—involves a more intense examination of and debate about the specifics of the bill and all proposed amendments. If the bill makes it through the third and final reading it is sent to the Federation Council, the upper house of the Federal Assembly, after whose approval it must be signed by the President before becoming law. 

A coalition of Russian environmental organizations, which were meeting for their annual conference at the time of the first Duma reading, immediately issued a condemnation of the Duma vote and initiated a campaign to overturn it. Olga Pitsunova of the Center for the Assistance for Ecological Initiatives in Saratov, was designated the coordinator of this campaign, which includes the participation of hundreds of organizations from 40 different cities. 

These organizations have held rallies and protests in their respective cities, and have appealed to their local legislatures to condemn the Duma’s decision. Thus far oblast' or regional legislatures in the following regions have issued condemnations of Min-Atom’s plan and the Duma’s vote: Saratov, Volgograd, Nizhegorod, Yaroslav, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Vladimir, Murmansk, and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Plus, the North-West Association—an inter-regional organization comprised of governors, legislators, and other officials from the 11 northwestern regions of the Russian Federation—sharply condemned the Duma vote, and appealed to the President and the Duma not to allow the measure to go through. As the present text is being written other regions are expressing their grave misgivings about Min-Atom’s plan and appealing to the Duma to reject the bill.