Russians have been dumping nuclear waste for decades. Not just from Beloyarsk but from many other reactors.
The dumping of highly radioactive wastes at sea has been banned worldwide for more than three decades, and the ban has been expanded to other forms of nuclear waste. Now a Russian report has detailed how the Soviet Union repeatedly broke those rules, making it clear that Moscow lied in asserting that it had never dumped radioactive waste into the oceans. The document paints a picture even darker than the rumors and half-truths about oceanic dumping that began to swirl as the Soviet Union collapsed. It turns out that a vast amount of highly radioactive waste was dumped by the Soviet Union: twice the combined total of 12 other nuclear nations.
The team of 46 experts that produced the new report of Soviet violations was headed by Dr. Aleksei V. Yablokov, the top environmental adviser to the Russian President. "It's very significant," said Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who has closely followed the issue. "The report has been motivated by a realization of the scope of the problem and a realization that they're going to have to have international assistance to deal with it. The cost of risk assessment alone could be in the billions." The Yablokov report says the Soviet Union dumped 2.5 million curies of radioactive wastes, including 18 nuclear reactors from submarines and an icebreaker. A big dose by any standard, the 2.5 million curies is almost exactly twice what was previously thought to have been dumped at sea during the whole of the nuclear era. Two of the 18 reactors went into the Sea of Japan. News of the sunken reactors, which are unfueled and less dangerous, nonetheless startled Tokyo and prompted it to petition Moscow for details.
The collapse of the former Soviet Union, with the consequent shift to a market driven economy and demilitarisation, has had a profound effect on the nuclear and associated industries. The introduction of tighter legislation to control the disposal of radioactive wastes has been delayed and the power and willingness of the various governmental bodies responsible for its regulation is in doubt. Previously secret information is becoming more accessible and it is apparent that substantial areas of Russian land and surface waters are contaminated with radioactive material. The Russian navy has traditionally dealt with virtually all of its radioactive wastes by disposal to sea. Many areas of the Barents, Kola and the Sea of Japan are heavily contaminated. Illegal dumps of radioactive waste abound.
Russia begins cleaning up the Soviets' top-secret nuclear waste dumpWhen the Soviet Union collapsed a vast store of spent nuclear fuel was abandoned in the Russian Arctic – an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Decades later an international clean-up has finally begun. During the Cold War period, nuclear submarines were refuelled at sea, and the spent nuclear fuel was then shipped to Andreyeva Bay, where it was placed in a special storage facility to cool off before being transported to a reprocessing plant at Mayak, in the Urals. But in the early 1980s, leaks sprung up in the storage system, causing high levels of radioactive contamination.
I’ve been all over the world to pretty much every country that uses nuclear power and I’ve never seen anything so awful before,” said Alexander Nikitin, a former naval officer and environmentalist who has been monitoring the site for years. “With nuclear material, everything should be done very carefully, and here they just took the material and threw it into an even more dangerous situation.”
But all of these are just lies from clowns right dissident?