Russians Petition Hungary to Keep Nuclear Waste at Home

MOSCOW, Russia, October 28, 2004 (ENS) - Russian environmental groups and 5,000 residents of the Chelyabinsk region Wednesday urged the new Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany to halt his country's plans to export spent nuclear fuel to Russia. An appeal signed by thousands of people from Chelyabinsk, where foreign spent fuel is reprocessed at the Mayak nuclear facility, was presented at Moscow Independent Press Center.

The high-level radioactive waste would endanger the lives of Chelyabinsk residents, the petitioners warned.

In 2003, Russian and Hungarian nuclear industries started discussion over a new contract to transport 1,500 tons of spent nuclear fuel to Mayak.

On April 29, 2004 - one day before Hungary joined the European Union - Russian and Hungarian officials signed a protocol allowing future contracts for dealing with spent nuclear fuel.

Presently, this protocol is delayed under public pressure. In 2002, the Russian Supreme Court ruled that the last shipment of spent nuclear fuel from Hungary, which occurred in 1998, was illegal under current legislation.

Hungary's Paks nuclear power plant, four pressurized light water reactors of Soviet design, has been operating since 1983. (Photo credit unknown)

Over the past 25 years, radioactive waste from reprocessing was dumped into open lakes and rivers near Mayak. The petitioners say the dumping has caused a widespread environmental catastrophe.

Reprocessing waste which is still stored at the Mayak facility has a total radioactivity over one billion curies - the equivalent of 20 radioactive releases on the order of Chernobyl, the world's worst nuclear disaster.

The nuclear industry has not been able to develop safe technology for the utilization of that waste, the environmental groups say.

In Hungary, the inhabitants of the village of Nemetker, near the Paks nuclear power plant, voted in February 1996, against the construction of a radioactive waste storage facility.

In 1996, Finland stopped shipments of spent nuclear fuel to Mayak on environmental grounds.

In 2001, after Russian authorities approved new legislation allowing the nuclear industry to import spent nuclear fuel from elsewhere around the world, Germany and the United States rejected the Russian offer to import and reprocess their high-level radioactive waste.

According to a public opinion poll conducted in 2002 by the ROMIR research center, a member of the Gallup group, nearly 92 percent of Russians are opposed to spent fuel import.

Svet Zabelin is a member of the Russian President's Commission on Human Rights, and a co-chairman of the Socio-Ecological Union International. (Photo courtesy SEU)

"Ecodefense urges the new Hungarian Prime Minister not to make the mistakes of his predecessors, but to follow the example of other civilized countries which rejected an offer to export nuclear waste to Russia," said Vladimir Slivyak of Ecodefense. The Russian environmental group was one of the initiators of the mass appeal to the Hungarian Prime Minister.

"Solving the problem of their own waste at the cost of Russian lives is cynical policy which, we hope, will be avoided by new Hungarian government," Slivyak said.

"Many Chelyabinsk residents have been exposed to dangerous radiation in the past and that's why we have always been speaking against nuclear waste import to Russia," said Andrey Talevlin of Pravosoznanie, environmental group from Chelyabinsk city.

In 2002, Supreme Court confirmed that last shipment of Hungarian nuclear waste was illegal. And we demand that such shipments never happen again," Talevlin said.