Russian budget-cutters court environmental disaster
By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Sergey Mund, the director of the Elektrogorsk Institute for Oil Processing, was clearly worried. On his institute's premises just east of Moscow were 663 rods of highly radioactive cobalt-60, used for research. "Eighty per cent of the rods need to be decommissioned now", Mund told journalists on February 17. "But it's a complex and costly operation, and we just don't have the money.
"In the worst case scenario, if the power or water supply failed, we could face an explosion, a fire and the subsequent contamination of a 100 square kilometre area."
Mund would have felt sympathy for scientists at the Kurchatov Nuclear Research Institute, who went on television a few days later to warn that underfunding of their institute was exposing Moscow residents to a major safety risk. With six research reactors and dozens of smaller research devices that use radioactive materials, the Kurchatov Institute is located inside Moscow's boundaries, upwind of the city centre.
The national channel Independent Television quoted scientists from the Kurchatov Institute as saying that they had received no money from the government for several months. Andrey Gagarinsky, the institute's external affairs director, confirmed on February 21 that the situation at the institute was "critical". If any serious fault occurred, Gagarinsky warned, the 9 million people in the Russian capital could face radioactive poisoning.
These examples illustrate a pattern that has become harrowingly familiar during the past few years. Health and environment risks that used to be accepted as necessary evils have now mounted far beyond the levels where they can reasonably be tolerated.
The prime causes include the government's cuts in state funding for science and for infrastructure maintenance, along with the collapse of private investment in industry.
Total investment in Russia's economy has now fallen to a third or even a quarter of its level at the beginning of the 1990s. State-funded investment has almost ceased. "In 1996 the federal government allocated only 3% of what was promised in its own investment program", Professor Boris Pichugin of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences observed in a recent article.
Perhaps the best-known instance of government cuts turning a risky situation into a mortally dangerous one is to be found in the naval ports of the Kola Peninsula and Arkhangelsk province.
A total of 88 derelict nuclear submarines are reported to be moored in the bases of the navy's Northern Fleet. The reactors of many of these vessels remain full of spent nuclear fuel which the fleet has no money to remove. If cooling mechanisms on the submarines break down, the result could be an explosion and massive radioactive contamination.
In the same league with the government's refusal to pay for decommissioning the submarine reactors is its squeezing of the civilian nuclear industry. Up until December 1, only 50% of the funds assigned to the Atomic Energy Ministry by the 1996 federal budget had been handed over. The results included chronic delays in the payment of wages to nuclear power plant employees, hunger strikes and an inevitable decline in maintenance standards.
The government's decision to put finances ahead of nuclear safety is symbolised by the plight of the Federal Nuclear and Radiation Safety Committee — the state body charged with investigating nuclear dangers.
Committee spokesperson Nikolai Filonov told the news agency Interfax late last year that the government was failing to supply his organisation with the funds assigned for it. As a result, the nearly paralysed committee was faced with having its telephone lines, water and electricity cut off.
In privatised industries as in the state sector, the last few years have been times of drastic cuts in investment and the decay of maintenance programs. According to the Prime-Tass news agency, total investments in Russia's huge oil industry fell by 25% last year.
Ominously, the oil industry has already been the culprit in some of the worst outrages suffered by the Russian environment during the post-Soviet period. Nearly two years were needed to clean up the sea of oil that spewed from a ruptured pipeline near Usinsk in the far north of European Russia in the autumn of 1994.
Environmentalists therefore reacted with alarm on February 16, when a major pipeline burst near the city of Saratov and threatened to send oil pouring out across the frozen Volga River. Hastily built dams prevented all but a few tonnes of oil from reaching the Volga, but the leak of about 1300 tonnes left an area of 65 hectares contaminated.
The wide publicity this incident received was something of a paradox, because the spill itself was not unusual. According to the Moscow daily Segodnya on February 21, 23 similar incidents have been recorded in Saratov province over the past two years.
Stephen O'Sullivan, associate oil and gas director at MC Securities Ltd in London, said in a mid-1996 interview that Russian oil spill losses probably totalled 20-23 million tonnes per year, a huge 8% of total output.
Greenpeace Russia speaks of a veritable ocean of leaked oil in western Siberia's Tyumen province, Russia's main oil-producing region. According to Greenpeace, spills of less than 9000 tonnes in Tyumen province are not even registered by the extracting firms, so news of them does not reach environmental control organs.
Moreover, the spills are proliferating fast. "A growth in the number of accidents in this sector is being noticed from year to year", Segodnya reported on February 18. "In 1996, compared to the previous year, the number of incidents with national oil pipelines grew by 40%. This is connected primarily with the generally worn-out state of the infrastructure (12% of the oil pipelines have been in service for more than 35 years, and 32% for more than 20 years.)"
In recent statements, nature protection officials have shown something close to despair at the problems of the country's environment — problems that were largely inherited, but which the policies of the current government are making far worse. Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, head of the State Committee for the Environment, lamented on January 31:
"We consider about half the territory of the Russian Federation to be ecologically unacceptable, where pollution threatens health. A complete clean-up of the environment would cost many times more than the annual gross domestic product.
"The problem of radioactive waste, at a minimum, would cost [US]$700 billion. To clean up the drinking water supply would cost about $200 billion." Russia's GDP in 1996 was about US$400 billion.
Government leaders show all the signs of dismissing environmental problems as insoluble, or of setting them aside as issues to be addressed only after the economy and the political scene have been "stabilised".
But environmental dangers are not like political opponents, to be conned, bought off or blasted into submission. Russia's leaders are at risk of finding that by the time they have "reformed" their country, their misplaced priorities will have made it uninhabitable.