The Lasting Soviet Nuclear Menace
Schorr, Jonathan
The Lasting Soviet Nuclear Menace With 15 of the most dangerous and decrepit nuclear reactors on earth, the former Soviet Union poses a radioactive threat that could make you nostalgic for the Red...
...At Murmansk, decommissioned nuclear submarines float at port, persistently leaking radiation into the sea and the air...
...It is not designed to be a protective barrier between the reactor core and the public...
...9 While nuclear plants may be cheap to operate, their catastrophes can be, well, catastrophic...
...In September, Russia touched off a dispute with Japan when it dumped 900 tons of liquid radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan...
...9 Electricity, the World Bank reports, is sold too cheaply in the former Soviet Union, so raising prices would provide an incentive to conserve...
...From Russia, with Gloves The danger of the plants begins with fundamental flaws in their planning...
...And there is a way to do that if the CIS takes just rudimentary steps toward conservation...
...And well-reasoned though it may be, the World Bank's recommendation to switch to conventional energy is like advising a beggar to invest his dimes in a certificate of deposit...
...At worst, they are a warning that the risk of nuclear catastrophe may be even higher now than it was in 1986...
...As Jean Sy-rota, president of the COGEMA Nuclear Corporation of France, noted in Le Monde, it would be relatively easy for the CIS to cut its energy consumption by 30 percent...
...In 1957, an explosion in a nuclear waste storage tank there released 300 times more radiation than the bomb at Hiroshima, poisoning an 8,900-square-mile area and irradiating more than 250,000 people...
...Office of Technology Assessment...
...While the Russian government claimed the leak was insignificant, plant workers told a different story, declaring that they could not guarantee nuclear safety...
...Tom Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, describes the control room of these reactors this way: "It's a far cry from the quality of the equipment you'd see in an American plant...
...Under the Soviet system, they held a privileged position...
...If this sounds nettlesome for everyday operations, it could be catastrophic in an emergency...
...Today, things have changed drastically, especially in the republics...
...Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC...
...High staff turnover, low pay, and generally less-than-pleasant conditions have taken a toll on plant operations...
...The Lithuanians have basically been in the situation where they're trying to both operate and regulate these plants, and they're doing this without access even to the design drawings," says Dodd...
...At best, they are a quiet reminder of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who died in the infamous 1986 explosion, and of the estimated 300,000 people being treated for radiation-related diseases from that and other disasters...
...Of the 63 reactors in the CIS, 43 are so unsafe that Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt says, "if they were in the United States or Sweden, we'd close them down by yesterday...
...western funds are not translating very rapidly into specific aid in Russia...
...Jonathan Schorr is a reporter for the Alameda (California) Times-Star...
...First, many bureaucrats' livelihoods are tied to the future of the nuclear industry—and the bureaucrats are the ones who call the shots...
...Russia was able to pay Western companies for repairing leaking pipelines by selling gas that otherwise would have leaked out...
...plants, this was what prevented a radiation spill at Three Mile Island...
...Nevertheless, Russia, strapped for cash and anxious to export energy, plans to build still another 23 new reactors in the next two decades...
...Where western plants have three to five redundant battery systems to provide power in an emergency, for instance, a Chernobyl-class reactor has only one...
...they are apparatchiks," says Selin...
...The people who are making these fundamental decisions are not necessarily nuclear experts...
...in 1989, one submarine sank in the Norwegian Sea, and another exploded near Vladivostok, spreading a cloud of radiation and killing 10 sailors...
...Like the Titanic but unlike U.S...
...In fact, one Russian scientist claims to have a map of dozens of nuclear accidents and radioactive waste disposals, which he is offering to sell to the West for $2 billion to establish a cleanup fund...
...Many of these plants are still without adequate operating procedures, and training programs are still lacking," says Laurin Dodd, manager of the reactor technology center at Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, which has been aiding the ex-Soviets...
...In July at the nuclear plant at Chelyabinsk—one of the most radioactive places on earth — a storage tank ruptured, leaking radioactive gas...
...By this estimate—totalling 15 percent of the 1987 Soviet GNP—that one disaster cost so much that the Soviet economy would have been better off if the USSR had never even heard of nuclear energy...
...The equipment is run down, dusty, dirty...
...reactors tend to shut themselves down if power rises too high, Soviet-designed plants keep heating up, possibly leading to a "China Syndrome" meltdown, the most dangerous nuclear scenario...
...Standard at U.S...
...When I talk about the first generation, I'm talking about the earlier Chernobyl reactors, and those are still operating...
...Clearly, closing the first generation reactors is the first important step toward safety if the problem of a continuing energy supply can be solved...
...In the Ukraine, which along with Lithuania owns the only two extra large Chernobyl-class reactors, uncertainty about the reactors' future has led to postponed maintenance and hedging about whether the operators will keep their jobs...
...Ten years later, a drought left a lake used for waste dumping so radioactive that standing near it for an hour would be fatal...
...Lectures from the U.S...
...They run institutions, ministries...
...It is not designed to be a protective barrier between the reactor core and the public...
...Consider these examples of life inside the former Soviet nuclear culture: > In April in Siberia, a tank exploded, poisoning the air over a 46-square-mile area...
...they also drained a vital lake for power...
...Instead," NRC chairman Selin explains, "the power plant is protected from the elements by a steel framed building, covered with sheet metal and a tar-paper roof...
...And where redundant systems do exist, they are often designed stupidly, with identical systems exposed to the same mishap...
...Eastern Europe has its share of nuclear powered woes, too...
...Bulgaria has been plagued with an inability to retain its skilled plant operators, shift supervisors, and key management personnel...
...But at the same time, 15 Chernobyl-type reactors are still chugging along in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and in Eastern Europe...
...He describes the incident as the "same scenario" as Chernobyl: The government severely underestimated the radiation released, then increased the estimate "several times...
...Bureaucracy is one problem...
...Like all quick fixes, however, these are superficial, even considering the hundreds of millions of dollars in expertise and training the West has already provided...
...But there is nothing like it in the early Soviet reactors...
...Another major problem is in the area of redundancy...
...It would be technically and economically feasible to meet electricity demand while closing these higher risk plants by the mid-1990s," according to a report published in March by the World Bank and the International Atomic Energy Agency...
...At the Tokyo G-7 economic summit this summer, a journalist asked Clinton what was going to happen to the aging Soviet-made nuclear reactors—the kind that blew up in 1986 at Chernobyl in the worst nuclear power accident in history...
...In fact, the operators themselves have become a serious safety concern...
...We have no substitutes" for power generation, Sergei Adamchik, of the Russian State Committee for the Supervision of Nuclear and Radiation Safety, told Business Week...
...operators have foregone all but emergency maintenance...
...They've got a plant that wasn't up to western standards to start with, they no longer have the direct connection to Moscow in terms of the support from the design organization, and all the people operating the plant are in an ambiguous situation with regard to employment...
...The plant is still running, and if there were another explosion there now, it could unleash 20 times as much radiation as Chernobyl...
...Even more serious is the lack of a concrete shell around the reactor...
...But there's nothing like that on Soviet reactors, which are covered with sheet metal and a tar paper roof...
...While the West has made a piecemeal effort to improve the design and operation of CIS and Eastern European reactors, Moscow has called home its resources, leaving some republics without the experts or even the blueprints necessary to run their plants...
...Dealing with such egregious waste would be far more efficient than building more nuclear plants...
...Lax housekeeping tends to mean lax operating standards...
...And the government's announcement—delayed until two days after the accident—ominously resembled traditional Soviet denials and delays...
...they also drained a vital lake for power...
...Nicholas Lenssen, a senior researcher at WorldWatch, agrees: "People who have built their careers in the nuclear industry aren't going to retreat and choose new professions if they don't have to...
...And remember that nuclear energy is disproportionately critical to the former Soviet Union...
...Without strong, honest leadership, as 15 plants like the one that exploded in Chernobyl keep their chain reactions going while Russia embarks on a 20-year nuclear building spree, it seems clear that this game of reactor roulette could continue well into the next century...
...And because the ministries for mining oil and gas are entirely separate in Russia, gas produced by an oil well is burned off rather than captured, and, as WorldWatch reports, gas pipelines leak so much that "inspection teams drop flares from aircraft and then watch for a flash...
...Whatever safety equipment there is can handle only small problems...
...But the evidence is that the bureaucracy and lack of attention to safety that produced Chernobyl hasn't changed a bit since 1986—despite Clinton and Yeltsin's cheery claims to the contrary...
...Here are some small ways to move in that direction: W Installing boiler controls, thermostats, and meters would save nearly half the energy now used for indoor heating, according to the U.S...
...The average CIS citizen uses twice as much energy as the average Western European, and the productivity of electricity in the CIS is less than half that in Western Europe...
...the Moscow Center for Energy Efficiency puts that number at 40 percent...
...Nuclear energy, however poorly produced, fills the gap...
...According to Valery Soyfer, a Russian biophysicist who studied the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, plant personnel initially ignored requirements to inform the central government, only complying when it was clear that the radiation would be detected anyway...
...Similarly, the focus of formerly Soviet industry on gross output rather than profit does little to make conservation attractive...
...9 Fixing gas pipelines should pay for itself...
...if a large one breaks, the reactor goes uncooled...
...Worse, the Russians are upgrading the earliest reactors, a sign that they will keep them running at least until 2010...
...In Armenia, where a nuclear plant was shut down after an earthquake in 1989, people have cut down and burned telephone poles, books, and furniture for fuel...
...But at what cost does the United States sanction a whitewash of the ex-Soviet nuclear danger...
...He clearly knows the stakes of the problem that political leaders are glossing over...
...The cost of the Chernobyl accident will total $358 billion, including lost electricity production, according to an estimate by the Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering in the former Soviet Union...
...This is a ludicrous claim...
...in November, security at Chernobyl was so lax that thieves were able to break into the plant and steal $1 million worth of uranium-filled reactor rods...
...There is a problem when a cab driver in a city earns more than a nuclear plant operator...
...Blithely, Clinton repeated what Boris Yeltsin had told him: Russia had "virtually completed" the task of "trying to decommission" its first generation nuclear plants...
...The same carelessness pervades the culture of reactor operators...
...As early as 1949, the plant at Chelyabinsk began spilling radioactive waste directly into a nearby river...
...It is designed to keep rain and snow out and keep heat in for the workers...
...Events in the past few months have underscored the importance of treating democracy in Russia gently...
...on saving energy are apt to be lost amid the cold realities of a hard winter and the growing pains of converting to a free market economy...
...Waste dumping and scuttling marine reactors at sea are routine aspects of Soviet nuclear history, and most accidents have been successfully hushed up...
...A concrete shell around the reactor is what prevented a radiation spill at Three Mile Island...
...So why is the troubled ex-Soviet nuclear industry being allowed to lumber on...
...CIS nations have made it clear they intend to stick with nuclear power, and the West is hardly in a position to offer the estimated $24 billion it will take to make the reactors safe...
...They have personal, professional, and in some cases financial interests...
...The efficiency of factories stands to be vastly improved through retrofitting and cogeneration, according to WorldWatch and Greenpeace...
...It is designed to keep rain and snow out and keep heat in for the workers," says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Ivan Selin...
...9 The former Soviet Union could cost effectively rehabilitate and build new gas-fired power plants, according to the World Bank/IAEA report...
...None of the Chernobyl-type reactors—seen as the most dangerous—has been shut down since the fall of the Soviet Union, except for two in Chernobyl itself...
...The need for power is so desperate in Bulgaria, for example, that nuclear operators have foregone all but emergency maintenance...
...Take the VVER 440-230, the next generation reactor after the Chernobyl class...
...While U.S...
...There's used equipment lying around, paint lacking . . . The quality of the place looks entirely different...
...For two reasons—one classically bureaucratic, the other classically economic...
...Particularly alarming is the situation in the former Soviet republics, which have been cut off from the Russian experts who designed, built, and ran the plants...
...The engineers and managers had their own towns, their own stores, top access to just about everything," explains NRC's Selin...
...The notion of nuclear warheads falling into the hands of a terrorist or dictator has been the stuff of wild western nightmares since the fall of the USSR...
...In Armenia, where a nuclear plant was shut down after an earthquake in 1989, people have cut down and burned telephone poles, books, and furniture for fuel...
...I don't quite know what he's talking about," says Ivan Selin, chairman of the U.S...
...These investments could be made with money raised from savings and sales of energy due to conservation...
...plants (which have had their problems, too), former Soviet reactors were designed on the assumption that they would never have an accident...
...They've got the worst [situation]," says Dodd...
...In October, the Ukranian government voted to keep Chernobyl itself up and running...
...The Lasting Soviet Nuclear Menace With 15 of the most dangerous and decrepit nuclear reactors on earth, the former Soviet Union poses a radioactive threat that could make you nostalgic for the Red Army BY JONATHAN SCHORR It must have been hard for President Clinton to keep a straight face...
...The other reason is decidedly practical...
...It has cooling equipment to compensate for the loss of only a small pipe...
...Strobe Talbott, the ambassador-at-large for the republics of the former Soviet Union, may be hinting at the reason when he says, "We consider it to be in our interest to do everything we can to see to it that reform survives and prevails in Russia and the other former Soviet republics...
...So why would Clinton repeat the Russian fib...
Vol. 25 • January 1993 • No. 12
