Nuclear Wastes: The Threat to our Oceans Radioactive Lobsters in Irish Sea
Cap de la Hague Discharge
Nuclear Wastes Storage in Pacific
Taiwan Exports Nuke Wastes to North Korea
Pakistan dumping of nuclear wastes in sea
Nuclear wastes piling up on Russian docks
Russian floating nuclear waste processing plant
US imports spent fuel rods from Asia
Russia seeks to import 20,000 tons of spent fuel rods
The most radioactive place on the planet
Recycling nuclear waste threat to oceans
Nuclear Russian Sub Sinks Endangering Marine Life - August 28, 2003
Radioactive Lobsters in Irish Sea
Lobsters in the Irish Sea near a plutonium processing plant in England have been found to be contaminated with radiation. According to Greenpeace, the nuclear plant at Sellafield is discharging over 2 million gallons of radioactive effluent into the ocean each day. If lobsters are contaminated, aren't fish and ocean vegetation also contaminated? [1]In a new conference (see December 13, 2002 Planet Ark story) UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher said that Britain might have to dump radioactive pollution stockpiled at its Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant into the Irish Sea after 2006 as tanks storing the waste age and may become unsafe. He said the government was researching ways to store the waste permanently onland but if this was not successful, then the radioactive liquid technetium-99 kept in offshore tanks may be dumped in the sea. "If the tanks can't take it beyond 2006, then we might have to look at an alternative solution... to discharge (their contents) into the Irish Sea quickly," Meacher told a news conference.
Cap de la Hague Discharge
"Low-level" radioactive discharge flows into the Atlantic from the French plutonium plant at Cap de la Hague, Brittany. According to Greenpeace, the La Hague factory is the single largest source of radioactive contamination in the European Community. [2]Nuclear Wastes Storage in Pacific
There have been attempts by a U.S company to build a nuclear waste storage facility on the Marshall Islands. Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii in response has said, "The Pacific is not a dumping ground for nuclear waste." Also, with the threat of a rise in sea levels from global warming looming, it would be the ultimate act of irresponsibility to construct such facilities. [4]Taiwan Exports Nuke Wastes to North Korea
Taiwan has sent 200,000 barrels of nuclear wastes to North Korea. North Korea, a destitute country which cannot feed its own people, cannot be counted on to store nuclear wastes in a responsible manner. [5]Pakistan dumping of nuclear wastes in sea
In Pakistan there has been clandestine dumping of nuclear wastes in the coastal waters of Balochistan. Balochistan is Pakistan's largest province, located in the southwest corner of the country sharing a border with Iran. The highest court in Pakistan has been informed that a European ship "Eastern Line" had dumped about 150 drums of highly toxic nuclear waste in the open sea near the town of Gadani, about 30 miles northwest of Karachi. [6]Nuclear wastes piling up on Russian docks
Nuclear wastes are piling up at docks and shipyards near Vladivostok, reported the San Francisco Chronicle's David Perlman on December 18, 1996. The inventory of wastes includes the reactor cores of 50 decommissioned missile submarines, plus countless separate fuel rods containing plutonium and various other toxic fission products. This is in close proximity to known nuclear waste ocean dumping areas off Vladivostok. "The Russians are very much aware of the possibility of a worst-case scenario, like a major explosion or fire that could release radioactivity into the atmosphere" said Bruce Molnia, a geologist and arctic environmental researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. The article mentions that the best estimates of nuclear wastes include 16,000 cubic meters of high-level solid wastes. At one time the Soviet Union routinely dumped "low-level" wastes into the Sea of Japan near Vladivostok, but that practice ended in 1993 after President Boris Yeltsin was notified that tons of contaminated nuclear reactor cores and high-level wastes from Soviet nuclear weapons tests had been dumped into the eastern Arctic Ocean off the Kola Peninsula throughout the Cold War. [7]Russian floating nuclear waste processing plant
Reuters reported on June 13, 1997 that voters in the town of Bolshoi Kamen (near Vladivostok) voted in a non-binding poll to reject a proposal that would have allowed a floating nuclear waste processing plant to be docked near them. A floating nuclear waste processing plant. Regional governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko has warned that unless something is done about the huge quantities of low-level nuclear wastes, they will be dumped into the Sea of Japan, a threat that elicited alarm in Tokyo. [8]US imports spent fuel rods from Asia
<>The U.S Department of Energy (D.O.E.) has scheduled over the next 13 years five shipments of highly radioactive nuclear fuel rods from Asian countries through the San Francisco Bay Area on the way to Idaho storage sites. The D.O.E says the purpose of bringing these nuclear wastes to the U.S. is to reduce the risk that terrorists will steal the nuclear material, but that goal endangers San Francisco Bay as well as the Pacific Ocean. The D.O.E must rethink this problem of storage of foreign nuclear wastes. And there are 150 shipments destined for the Charleston Naval Weapons Station in South Carolina. [9]
Russia puts on hold the import 20,000 tons of spent fuel rods
Note: The following was published on this website several years ago. Apparently the attempt to import 20,000 tons of nuclear waste has been placed on hold. We are keeping this item on the web site to show the lengths a country will go in conducting dangerous handling of nuclear wastes :
n July 11, 2001 President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday signed a law, on import and storage of spent nuclear fuel. Russia stands to earn about $ 20 billion in revenue from the storage of 20,000 tons of nuclear wastes. A Russian opinion poll demonstrated that 89% of those polled disapproved of importing the nuke wastes.
Since the law was passed, Russia has imported spent nuclear fuel from Soviet-built nuclear power plants in Bulgaria and Ukraine. That nuclear waste would go to Mayak — site of a 1957 nuclear waste tank explosion that spread radioactive pollution — and another facility at Zheleznogorsk in Siberia. (For more on Mayak, see segment The most radioactive place on the planet ).
It is not only the storing, but the transporting of 20,000 tons of nuclear wastes that carries the threat to the environment. The thousands of miles that the spent fuel would have to be transported by land and sea, the integrity of the containers holding the wastes, the many times containers would have to be loaded and unloaded, the opportunities available to terrorists to hijack this material.
Russia’s history with nuclear technology has been one of stealth, mismanagement and total disregard for its environment. Too often its attitude towards storing nuclear wastes has led to hiding nuclear wastes, discarding nuclear reactors into the Sea of Japan and Arctic seas and pumping billions of gallons of atomic waste into the ground and into wells, close enough to major rivers as to pose a threat to fresh water sources and to the seas. Russia simply cannot be trusted with 20,000 tons of nuclear wastes.
Russia cannot be trusted with its nuclear wastes. In the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history, the Chernobyl plant exploded on April 26, 1986, blowing the top off its reactor and scattering nuclear fallout over eastern Russia, Scandinavia and Europe. Russia concealed the event from its own people for two days, then announced the accident after alarm bells went off in a Swedish nuclear plant that detected increased radiation. Next, evacuations were halted from nearby towns, as firefighters and other workers battled the radioactive fire with inadequate protective clothing. Over 4300 cleanup workers died, as 70,000 people were disabled in Ukraine alone and millions exposed to varying degrees of radiation.
Russia cannot be trusted with any facet of its nuclear industry. In Smolensk, about 250 miles from Moscow, there is a nuclear plant similar to Chernobyl’s. In 1997 the Russian government, numbed with debt, did not pay workers at the Smolensk plant for months, and withheld funds for maintenance and parts replacement. This led to a lowering of workers’confidence in the safety system that would shutdown a reactor in an emergency situation. Maxim Katayev, an engineer at the plant, and a small group of workers in desperation walked the 250 miles to Moscow, protesting the threat of another Chernobyl. Somehow they secured a meeting with Energy Minister Boris Nemtsov. Reminding the minister how desperate conditions had become in Smolensk, they received a promise of $23 million as an immediate first payment, to be followed by $51 million monthly. Not trusting the promise, the Smolensk workers did not leave Moscow until they had written proof that the first payment was made.
Another example of why Russia cannot be trusted with 20,000 tons of nuclear wastes, is when whistleblower, Aleksandr Nikitin, a nuclear engineer and former Russian naval captain, exposed a series of nuclear submarine accidents, in which hundreds of Russian naval personnel died from radiation poisoning. Nikitin also revealed Russia’s lack of safety precautions, poorly constructed submarines and inadequate protections from the hazards of decaying nuclear subs mothballed at Severodvinsk, Gremikha and other port towns in northwest Russia. Russia punished Nikitin for exposing his country’s criminally-negligent system of how-not-to-manage a nuclear submarine fleet by imprisoning him for almost a year and prosecuting him for five years, charging him with treason. Nikitin won his final court battle in September, 1999 when Russia’s equivalent of the U.S Supreme Court acquitted him of any wrongdoing.
In the spring of 2000 Russia’s President Vladimir Putin dismantled his country’s equivalent of the EPA and Forest Service, and transferred their functions to the Ministry of Natural Resources, exiling the troublemakers to bureaucratic Siberia. Prior to announcing a willingness to take on 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, Putin's action did not inspire confidence.
Russia has to earn the world's trust to invite this much radioactive material into their country. They are far from minimizing the concerns surrounding safety issues of such a large inventory of dangerous material, dangerous to the atmosphere and to the oceans. Because more than 90% of the spent fuel originated in the U.S., we do have a say in whether or not this nuclear waste goes to Russia. However, President Bush, who has begun his own environmental protections dismantling, is not likely to orchestrate a protest towards the 20,000 tons. Let future generations worry about it.
The most radioactive place on the planet
Artificial lakes containing more than 14 billion cubic feet of waste from the Mayak nuclear processing plant are filled to capacity and within a few years may leak into the region's rivers, Gov. Pyotr Sumin of the Chelyabinsk region in the Ural Mountains wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov…Mayak, a major nuclear weapons plant during Soviet times, has been the site of several accidents, including a 1957 waste-facility explosion that contaminated 9,200 square miles. The region has been called the most radioactive place on the planet because of accidents and Soviet-era nuclear waste dumping into lakes and rivers. The vice governor of the Chelyabinsk region, Gennady Podtyosov, once said in an interview that the water level in the lakes was just 12 inches below the limit. If action is not taken, contaminated water could burst the dam within three to four years, he said. ``It would be a major catastrophe,'' Podtyosov said. ``Waste would pollute rivers and flow into the Arctic Ocean.'' [10]Recycling Nuclear Wastes Threat to Oceans
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is working to determine if/how NRC-licensed facilities (i.e.commercial nuclear power reactors) can incinerate, "release," "reuse,"or "recycle" many forms of nuclear wastes - metal, concrete, soil, plastics, chemicals, etc. - thus allowing them to end up in your local landfill, incinerator, or even in common consumer products that you find on your local store shelves. We are transporting dioxin and other chemicals into the air and oceans now through the incinerating of hospital refuse and other plastics. Soon we may be doing the same with radioactive material. We human beings are becoming walking toxic dumps, the average adult body possessing many chemicals, such as dioxin, PCBs, mercury and lead. See Environmental Working Group studyAnother Nuclear Russian Sub Sinks Endangering Surrounding Marine Life - August 28, 2003
A rusty nuclear derelict submarine left its moorings in Gremika, located above the Arctic Circle, on Thursday August 28, and headed for a port on the Kola Peninsula in stormy seas. The purpose of the trip was to dismantle the sub for scrap and presumably to transfer its two nuclear reactors and radioactive material to a better storage site. The ship sank in 780 feet of water, killing 9 crew members. The causes cited by various Russian officials were negligence, lack of discipline, a culture of "bravado."In the past two decades Russia has decommissioned about 190 nuclear submarines, about 126 of which are still docked, with their nuclear reactors, at various ports in the former USSR. It will cost that country an estimated $4 billion to dismantle the remaining subs, however Russia approved last year only $70 million for nuclear safety measures throughout the country. Russia claims that its 126 subs do not pose a danger, but a spokesman for the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental organization, warned of the threat to the environment of these submarines. The sub was carrying spent nuclear fuel that could leak out into rich fisheries in the surrounding area of the Barents Sea. [11]
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