GREENPEACE SEES SECOND DUMA READING AS BREAKTHROUGH FOR STOPPING SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL IMPORTS TO RUSSIA

18 April 2001

Moscow - 116 Members of the Duma have voted against proposed law amendments to allow radioactive waste imports to Russia. During the first vote last December, only 38 Duma members had opposed the law change. With 230 parliamentarians (89 less than in the first reading) only slightly more than half of the 450 Duma members have voted in favor of the law changes. The third and decisive reading is expected for the end of May.

"More and more Duma members are finally realising how irresponsible and dangerous it would be to open Russia's gates for thousands of tons of the deadly cargo. They feel, that the people who have voted them into the Duma are furious about seeing their country turned into the world's biggest waste dump." said Tobias Muenchmeyer of Greenpeace International.

The permission for importing radioactive waste, being promoted by Russia's cash-strapped Atomic Ministry (Minatom), is designed to allow Russia to become the world's nuclear waste dump. Minatom believes that over the next decade it could import up to 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from countries including Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Germany and Spain - in contracts worth up to $21 billion.

The main promoter for a radioactive waste import scheme, former Atomic Minister Evgeny Adamov, had been fired by the Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 28. The dismissal of Adamov had followed the release by Greenpeace on March 3 of a confidential report from the Russian Parliamentary Anti-Corruption Commission detailing large-scale illegal business activities. But last week also Adamov's successor, the newly appointed Atomic Minister Alexander Rumyantsev, has publicly recommended to import radioactive waste to Russia.

"By supporting radioactive waste imports to Russia, Rumyantsev is the new enemy No.1 for Russia's environment" said Muenchmeyer. "The Duma has to realize, that the plans of the Atomic Ministry are not in the interest of the Russian people, but exclusively in the business interest of the Ministry's key officials. Adamov's criminal businesses don't represent an exception, but the rule of how Minatom is working."

Supporters of radioactive waste imports claim, by importing radioactive waste, Russia could enter a profitable international market for nuclear reprocessing services. Yesterday Greenpeace released in Moscow an analysis on the economics of nuclear fuel reprocessing prepared by the French institute "WISE-Paris" of Mycle Schneider, the alternative nobel-price laureate from 1997, which concluded: "Given the unfavorable economic conditions for the future of reprocessing in France, the country with the most favorable conditions in the field, the prospects for a competitive import market for spent fuel management services in Russia seem highly unrealistic."

The proposed sites for Spent Nuclear Fuel storage are Mayak in the Ural mountains as well as Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Mayak is the world's largest nuclear complex and one of the most radioactively contaminated sites in the world. According to a statement in 1998 by G.J. Dicus, a commissioner for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission :"As a result of early operational practices and some accidents at Mayak, workers at the plant and populations around the site were exposed to unusually large amounts of radiation and radioactive materials. In many cases, the doses were comparable to those received by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings."

November last year Russia's Central Election Committee had declared 600,000 signatures of 2.5 million signatures collected by Greenpeace and other environmentalists unvalid, dropping the number of valid signatures under the amount of 2 million required for carrying out a nation-wide referendum.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

- Tobias Muenchmeyer (Berlin) +49 170 86 66 052
- Ivan Blokov (Moscow) +7 095 257 41 22

www.greenpeace.org/~nuclear/waste/russianwaste.html