Russian environmentalists criticise uranium storage in Siberia

Oct 16, 2009, 12:28 GMT

Moscow - A Russian environmentalist group Friday criticised the way nuclear waste from Germany was being stored in the open air in restricted military areas in Siberia, and appealed for awareness of the issue in Germany.

Vladim Slivyak, head of the Ecodefense environmental group, said that barrels of nuclear wastes from Germany were being stored under the open skies, despite protests even from Russia's own nuclear authorities.

'This is not denied by anyone in Russia, not even Rosatom,' he said, referring to the country's nuclear power state holding company.

And while the watchdog agency Rostechnadsor has been criticising the situation since 2002, 'they are equally powerless because all this is a kind of secret military matter,' Slivyak said.

His own group is prevented from investigating the matter more closely because the storage sites are in off-limits military areas, he said.

Slivyak estimated that some 100,000 tonnes of toxic nuclear waste have been shipped from Germany to Russia since 1996 under bilateral agreements. He personally witnessed several uranium shipments arriving in St. Petersburg.

'We were able to approach the containers without any problems and measure the radioactivity with geiger counters,' he said.

The containers are then shipped by rail through the city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals. 'But this is also a closed city because of its strategic importance,' the Ecodefense head noted.

He said it could be assumed that there were many radioactivity victims in the area of the storage sites, 'but the doctors would never admit that the cause is nuclear waste.'

Slivyak said a further problem is that the people living in such areas, where they have grown up and were used to the situation, the nuclear waste storage sites 'is not an issue.'

'The people remain in these closed cities because they have grown up there and work. The mentality of these people is very unique,' he said.

Therefore in principle only Germany itself could change the situation.

In Germany, the Urenco company which is responsible for the uranium shipments rejected any criticism. Both the transport and storage of the nuclear wastes were covered by contracts with the Russian company Temex and were completely legal, Urenco spokeswoman Antje Evers said.