MOSCOW - Dangerous levels of radioactivity - exceeding the amount produced by 10,000 nuclear reactors - have been detected in two rivers near a western Siberian nuclear complex, a U.S.-based nuclear watchdog said in a report issued Thursday.
The Government Accountability Project said that more than enough radioactivity to meet the world's electrical power demand had been found in the Tom and Romashka rivers flowing from the Siberian Chemical Complex, Russia's largest nuclear site.
"This pollution is probably the largest ongoing discharge of radioactivity in the world," Norm Buske, the head author of the report, said Thursday by telephone from Washington.
Buske said it was shocking that the Russian government has never announced the contamination and is not taking any precautions to protect civilians or clean it up. "It's a huge secret out of control," he said.
Buske, a physicist and oceanographer with the Government Accountability Project, traveled to the Tomsk region some 3,000 kilometers east of Moscow in August and conducted tests in the Tom and Romashka rivers.
Both rivers run near the 40-year-old nuclear complex, which once developed top secret Soviet weapons. The complex includes two working reactors, a uranium-enrichment plant that was closed in 1990, and a reprocessing facility. It also contains the world's biggest underground storage site for nuclear waste, into which highly radioactive waste from the reprocessing facility is still being pumped.
Alexander Adam, head of the ecological committee in the Tomsk regional administration, said the findings in the report are false and "elicit surprise."
Buske's expedition, which was carried out with a group of Russian environmentalists, aimed to assess the area around Tomsk, where an accident at the complex's reprocessing plant occurred in 1993 and contaminated three nearby villages.
Analyses found strontium 90 in plant life along the Romashka River at 10,000 picocuries per liter, the report said. Levels above 8 per liter are outlawed in U.S. drinking water. Dangerous levels of phosphorous 32 were also found, it said. Buske said fish purchased in a Tomsk market had radiation levels 20 times higher than normal. The levels of radioactivity are too high to originate at a nuclear power plant or in normal reprocessing, the report said, adding that there might be a secret nuclear military reactor or an immense nuclear accelerator at the complex. Some of the radiation was discharged as recently as two weeks before the tests were conducted, suggesting that radioactivity is continuing to be discharged from some source in Tomsk, Buske said. Siberian Chemical Complex officials could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Nuclear Power Ministry spokes man Yury Bespalko called the report false, saying as far as he knew the complex does not dump any nuclear waste into the rivers.
Thomas Nilsen of the Norwegian Bellona environmental group said that the fact that Phosphorus 32 was found in samples of aquatic vegetation that grew in at the point where the Romashka River enters the Tom indicated that the pollution came straight from an operating reactor.
Maintenance of Russia's aging nuclear plants and the adequate disposal of nuclear waste has been a matter of concern with activists for some time.
In spite of this, Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov is fiercely lobbying for legislation that would allow Russia to import nuclear waste for reprocessing and long-term storage, activities that would bring extra hard currency into the government's coffers. State Duma hearings over the proposed bill, which ministry spokesman Bespalko said has been approved by the Cabinet, are scheduled for Nov. 22.
U.S. Vice President Al Gore signed an agreement in 1994 with then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to close down the old reactors in Tomsk. But the reactors are still running because no alternative power source for the 500,000 residents of Tomsk is available.
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