Worse than Chernobyl: 'dirty timebomb' ticking in a rusting Russian nuclear dump threatens Europe

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2640425.ece

20,000 discarded uranium fuel rods stored in the Arctic Circle are corroding.
The possible result? Detonation of a massive radioactive bomb experts say could
rival the 1986 disaster. By Rachel Shields
Published: 10 June 2007
A decaying Russian nuclear dump inside the Arctic Circle is threatening to catch
fire or explode, turning it into a "dirty bomb" that could impact the whole of
northern Europe, including the British Isles.

Experts are warning that sea water and intense cold are corroding a storage
facility at Andreeva Bay, on the Kola Peninsula near Murmansk. It contains more
than 20,000 discarded fuel rods from nuclear submarines and some nuclear-powered
icebreakers. A Norwegian environmental group, Bellona, says it has obtained a
copy of a secret report by the Russian nuclear agency, Rosatom, which speaks of
an "uncontrolled nuclear reaction".

John Large, an independent British nuclear consultant who has visited the site,
told The Independent on Sunday: "The nuclear rods are fixed to the roof and
encased in metal to keep them apart and prevent any reactions from occurring.
However, sea water has eroded them at their base, and they are falling to the
floor of the tanks, where inches of saltwater have collected.

"This water will begin to corrode the rods, a reaction that releases hydrogen, a
gas that is highly explosive and could be ignited by any spark. When another rod
falls to the floor and generates such a spark, an enormous explosion could
occur, scattering radioactive material for hundreds of kilometres."

Mr Large, who was decorated by Russia's President Vladimir Putin for his role in
the salvage operation that retrieved nuclear material from the Kursk submarine
in 2000, added: "This wouldn't be a thermonuclear or atomic explosion, as in a
bomb, but the outcome is just as bad. Remember Chernobyl? If you had the right
weather conditions and wind pattern, this would mean a radioactive cloud
drifting over the UK."

The three storage tanks contain more than 32 tons of radioactive material. But
the Kola Peninsula is littered with relics of Soviet nuclear facilities, housing
more than 100 tons of nuclear waste - the largest concentration in the world.

Experts predict that a major explosion at Andreeva Bay could destroy all life in
a 32-mile radius, including Murmansk and a sliver of Norway, whose border is
only 28 miles away. But a much wider area of Norway, north-west Russia and
Finland would be rendered uninhabitable for at least 20 years, and huge
quantities of radioactive material would be dumped into the Barents Sea.

"In the best case a small, limited explosion in just one of the stored rods
could lead to radioactive contamination in a 5km radius," Aleksandr Nikitin, a
Russian former submarine officer and nuclear safety inspector turned
environmental activist, told the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. "In the worst
case, such a single explosion could cause the entire tank facility to explode.
We have no calculations for what that could lead to."

Mr Nikitin, whose work for Bellona led to continuing treason charges in Russia,
added: "We are sitting on a powder keg with a burning fuse, and we can only
guess about the length of the fuse." Nils Bohmer, nuclear physicist and head of
Bellona's Russian division, told the newspaper: "It will at least, at a careful
estimate, hit northern Europe. There are enormous amounts of radioactivity
stored in these tanks."

Other activists have voiced concern about the security of stored nuclear waste
in the Kola Peninsula, amid reports that some is left outside in barrels,
protected by only a link fence and a couple of guards. Washington-based
GlobalSecurity.org reported that in 1993 about 1.8kg of enriched uranium was
stolen from the Andreeva Guba fuel storage area. Although the material was
quickly recovered, the fact that some of the uranium is enriched to between 30
and 40 per cent, much higher than the 2 to 3 per cent used in civil nuclear
reactors, could make it tempting to terrorists seeking to make a "dirty bomb".

Apart from the decay at the Andreeva Bay facility, said Ben Ayliffe, senior
climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace UK, "security is so lax that almost
anyone who wants to can just walk in. It's like Homer Simpson meets Dad's Army."

As the 1986 Chernobyl disaster showed, drifting atmospheric radiation can
contaminate crops and water supplies more than 1,000 miles from the site of the
explosion. In the world's worst civilian nuclear incident, the four explosions
that ripped through the power plant in what is now eastern Ukraine resulted in
the dispersal of a radioactive cloud containing at least 100 times as much
radiation as was released by the combined effect of the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Although only three people were killed by the Chernobyl blast, it has been
estimated that around 100,000 people have since died from cancers caused by
exposure to radiation, with thyroid cancers increasing by 88.5 per cent. A
further 300,000 people have developed non-fatal tumours even though half a
million people were evacuated immediately after the accident.

The economic and social effects remain devastating, despite large-scale
international assistance. Many industries have collapsed, and 1.4 million acres
of prime agricultural land and forest destroyed by the explosion are still
unusable. Residents are banned from entering a zone some 20 miles around the
site, yet hundreds of elderly people have ignored government restrictions and
gone back to their homes in surrounding villages, where they raise animals and
eat fruits and berries from the radiation-soaked land.

But experts using the Chernobyl "radioactive release" to predict the likely
effects of a disaster on the Kola Peninsula point out that Britain and the rest
of Europe escaped remarkably lightly. The 1986 explosion occurred on a still
summer night sending radioactive particles straight upwards for the most part,
until they encountered winds in the upper atmosphere.

Although the radiation was widely dispersed, there was little rainfall in the
immediate area, or across Europe, in the following week. The only area of
Britain where rain brought the radiation to earth is relatively lightly
populated: north Wales, parts of Cumbria and south-western Scotland. Care still
has to be taken with meat from the affected area, but there are no reliable
statistics that show any impact on human health in Britain.

Another Chernobyl-type meltdown, this time in the Arctic, could have much more
far-reaching effects. The worst case would be widespread fallout caused by rain
in a densely populated area, causing untold social and economic disruption
beyond the threat to life.

Even without a catastrophic explosion, contamination from the Kola Peninsula
facility is spreading. The region is outstandingly beautiful, with jutting
cliffs, snow-covered peaks and deep fjords. The soil is rich in minerals, the
rivers swim with Atlantic salmon, and the land is home to reindeer and their
nomadic Saami herders. But Andreeva Bay is already devoid of marine life, and
much of the area around it, a landscape of rusting submarine hulks, cranes,
workshops and a disused power station, now stands empty.

A rupture or fire in the storage tanks would spread radiation further, probably
forcing the evacuation of the nearest town, Zaozersk, which is less than four
miles away. But Andreeva Bay is merely one of five naval bases on the Kola
Peninsula, a testament to the era when the Soviet Union vied for supremacy with
the US and nuclear capability, both in weapons and energy, was seen as the means
to that end.

The ice-free harbours of the White Sea have always been the base of the Northern
Fleet, which has two-thirds of the navy's nuclear-powered vessels. Its
submarines, which can circle the globe without surfacing or refuelling, were a
source of pride in superpower days. But with this came an attitude of careless
arrogance towards the environment - apart from the effects on land, many spent
nuclear fuel rods were dumped into the Kola and Barents seas - and the region is
now paying the price.

In the economic crisis that followed the collapse of communism and the breakup
of the Soviet Union, the nuclear submarine fleet and its support structure were
hit by drastic cutbacks. The decommissioning of submarines rapidly became a
major national problem, with suitable storage facilities filled to capacity and
little money to carry out the necessary expansion.

The fuel rods at Andreeva Bay first began to leak radioactive material in 1982,
when they were stored in flimsy navy warehouses. In a precursor of the emergency
action taken at Chernobyl, a startled government hastily erected three massive
concrete tanks filled with metal pipes in which the rods could be safely stored.
These facilities were intended only as a provisional measure, to last no more
than five years, yet they have now been housing potentially lethal uranium for
more than two decades. The problem has been compounded by confusion over who is
directly responsible for the area: the nuclear agency Rosatom, which controls
all Russian nuclear sites, or the defence ministry, which has authority over
military bases.

President Putin's administration denied Norwegian claims that the tanks at
Andreeva Bay were unstable, claiming that the nuclear waste posed no
environmental hazard. This was echoed by Rosatom's deputy head, Andrei Malyshev,
who declared that "the possibility of a nuclear event that is significant in
terms of safety is excluded".

Mindful, however, that the Soviet authorities sought to deny there had been an
accident at Chernobyl, Russia's neighbours have been pressing for action to
tackle contamination in the Kola Peninsula for years. In the 1990s European
leaders began efforts to help secure the region. A 2003 agreement between
Sweden, France and Russia pledged more than £30m, a deal described by the
Swedish Foreign Minister as "a historic event". But little has happened since,
partly due to the enormous costs.

It is estimated that a clean-up of the Kola Peninsula, either by moving
radioactive material to permanent storage facilities or transporting it to a
reprocessing plant, will cost around £2.2bn. Although Britain, the EU and the US
have offered help, with Norway saying last month that it would pay to
decommission two nuclear submarines, Russia will still end up footing most of
the bill. It also faces the hazardous task of shifting the waste to where it can
be dealt with, making Britain's problems in handling waste from old, and
possibly new, nuclear plants seem minor.

After the radioactive material has been extracted from the dumps by
remote-controlled vehicles, it will have to be transported in sealed containers
down the coast to Murmansk, where the government hopes to construct new
long-term storage facilities. Material which can be reprocessed will be carried
in trains hundreds of miles to Mayak, in the heart of the Ural mountains. The
residents of the city, who face the prospect of having tons of highly dangerous
material passing through for several years, formally learned of the proposals
only last autumn.

The latest controversy shows, however, that doing nothing is no longer an
option. Mr Ayliffe said: "The Andreeva Bay nuclear dump is incredibly
dangerous... a disaster waiting to happen that underlines the intractable
problem of how to deal with the thousands of tons of highly toxic waste created
by nuclear power."

Danger Zone: What will happen if there is an explosion

Best scenario: a limited explosion of one rod could contaminate a three-mile
radius around Andreeva Bay. Wildlife could die out. Worst scenario: the entire
facility explodes, radiation could destroy life in a 32-mile radius and make
areas of Norway, Finland and Russia uninhabitable. Contamination could reach the
UK and beyond.

The threat within the tanks

7,000 nuclear fuel rods are stored in each tank. Each rod hangs separately,
encased in a metal tube to prevent any uncontrolled reaction.

Seawater enters through cracks in the tank and erodes the rods, causing them to
fall into the salt water that has collected in the tube.

Hydrogen is released when the rods corrode. A spark from another falling rod
could ignite this highly explosive gas, setting off an "uncontrolled explosion".

Dirty bombs: the terror threat posed by nuclear materials

Unlike a nuclear bomb, which requires costly precision engineering, the
construction of a "dirty bomb" requires only the combination of radioactive
material with a standard explosive, which serves to scatter the particles.

Few people might be killed in the explosion, but the disruption caused by
contamination in a city centre would be huge. Authorities in several countries
claim to have foiled such plots by terrorists.

In 1995 Russian police said they had prevented Chechen separatists from
detonating radioactive isotopes wrapped in explosives in a Moscow park. Londoner
Dhiren Barot, jailed in 2004 for planning to detonate dirty bombs in underground
car parks in London and New York, sought radioactive material from hospital
equipment such as X-ray machines.

Further reading: 'The Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive
Contamination', by Nilsen, Kudrick and Nikitin (Bellona)


--
"An Injustice To One Man, Woman or Child
Threatens Justice To All People Equally"
-Dean Tong



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