Paul Goble
Staunton, Sept. 22 – Rossatom, the Russian agency for overseeing its nuclear industry, says that as of the end of last year, 573 million cubic meters of nuclear waste had been stored in Russia; but independent experts say that the storage is inadequate because the half life of some elements in the waste measures in billions of years.
Many in Russia and abroad assume that the problems are limited to Soviet-era dumps and to places far from Moscow; but both assumptions are wrong, according to Aleksey Orzharovsky, one such expert, who says that in some ways the situation has gotten worse since 1991 and affects the Moscow area (kedr.media/stories/po-sledam-atoma/).
Until the end of Soviet times, officials treated radioactive trash in many cases as no different from ordinary trash and did not take measures to protect the environment from it, he says. But while concerns mounted after 1991, many firms gave up land where they had dumped nuclear waste earlier; and now no one feels responsible for doing it.
Russian media have talked about the problems of the leakage of radioactivity mostly in places far from the Russian capital lest residents there become alarmed; but Ozharovsky and others have documented that radioactivity is leaking throughout the region in and around the capital.
According to them, radiation is already leaking into the underground water supply often without anyone sounding the alarm; and even where officials are trying to contain the nuclear waste, they do not have the technology to protect against waste that will still be dangerously radioactive thousands or even billions of years from now.
As Muscovites become aware of this, they are likely to protest and to demand more than the simple shifting of newly developed trash to regions and republics far from the capital that the powers that be have promoted as a solution. It isn’t and an entirely new approach needs to be adopted for controlling something far longer into the future than anyone can now imagine.
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