Moscow’s Plans for ‘Nuclear Colonization of Siberia’ Infuriating People There

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 3 – While most Russians are focusing on the pandemic and economic crisis, the Kremlin is continuing to engage in the highly profitable import of nuclear wastes to be stored forever in its territory. Russians who know about this program are outraged, and so the authorities are taking steps to hide what they are doing.

            Most of the highly radioactive nuclear wastes being imported into Russia comes from Russia, but most of it is being transshipped across the European portion of that country to final resting places east of the Urals, an action Irkutsk journalist Maks Veselov refers to as “the nuclear colonization of Siberia” (babr24.com/kras/?IDE=200197).

            Because people there are angry about that, he says, Rosatom, the government’s nuclear power agency, has taken steps to prevent the kind of environmental protests that they might engage in. First of all, the agency has described a spent nuclear fuel storage site as a research facility even though nothing of that kind is being done at it just 40 kilometers from Krasnoyarsk.

            This sleight of hand, Veselov says, has the additional purpose of supposedly keeping what Rosatom is doing within the admittedly lose framework of Russian law which bans simply importing nuclear wastes but allows that to happen as long as the authorities commit to reprocessing it so it won’t be dangerous to the population.

            But more seriously, Rosatom is seeking bids for the construction of final isolation facilities. But instead of being open and aboveboard, the competition is being restricted to those who already have government licenses and therefore can be counted on not to led anyone know what is being planned (babr24.com/kras/?IDE=198397).

            That approach very much raises the possibility that Moscow has no plans to reprocess the nuclear wastes and that they will remain dangerous to people, in this case, people far from the center, just like it is also trying to do with the annoying but far less dangerous trash the capital’s officials want to ship to the northern portions of the Russian Federation.