Urals Nuclear Industry Short Of Tails

04.12.2009 — Analysis

The work of Russian radioactive substances processing and storage facilities is so cloudy that the results of applying high technologies in this sphere can easily be mistaken for a nuclear waste dump and vice versa. The RusBusinessNews observer attempted to assess the level of nuclear safety in the Urals region.

Urals Ecologists' Victory Celebration Sergei Novikov, the official representative of Rosatom made a statement on 20 November 2009 that the State owned corporation will not extend or revise contracts with European companies Urenco and Evrodif for importing the depleted uranium hexafluoride ("uranium tails") from Europe. He stressed that this decision has been made by Sergei Kiriyenko, the Head of Rosatom, as early as in 2006 when the programme for the construction of new nuclear power plans in the RF has been adopted. "Rosatom is adhering to this decisision. The existing contracts are running out in 2010, they will not be extended, nor any new contracts will be entered into," said Sergei Novikov.

DUF6 is a result of processing uranium for the use in nuclear weapons. The essence of uranium contracts was as follows: 15-20% of "tails" were further enriched at Russian enterprises and were sent back to the customer, while most of them remained in storage at the processing site.

In the last 10 years 20 thousand tons of uranium hexafluoride has been imported to Russian from the Gronau site (Germany). Most of the "tails" stayed at the Ural Electrochemical Integrated Plant in Novouralsk (the Sverdlovsk Oblast); this amounts to 15-17 thousand tons. Olga Podosyonova, the Ekaterinburg coordinator of the International group Ecodefence!, told RusBusinessNews, "Nuclear scientists call DUF6 a valuable raw material while we call is radioactive waste because from the most recent shipments to Novouralsk virtually nothing was shipped back. Several stadium-size open air sites are filled up with uranium hexafluoride containers in Novouralsk."

Nuclear specialists point out that according to the international scale of safety of transportation where score one is the most dangerous and score nine is the least dangerous DUF6 is classified as score seven, the same as chemical fertilizers. This score is assigned to DUF6 because the material only presents the chemical hazard to the environment.

The officials at the Ural Electrochemical Integrated Plant in Novouralsk declined answering the official query regarding the situation with uranium hexafluoride RusBusinessNews sent them by saying, "Anything we say on the issue may be used by the greens in their speculations."

Mikhail Zhukovskiy, the Director of the Industrial Ecology Institute of UB of RAS, reckons that calling uranium hexafluoride waste is wrong. "So much of uranium hexafluoride has been accumulated over the time of the enterprise working in Novouralsk that new shipments do not affect the situation much. Hexafluoride is stored in special containers which are made in accordance with international standards. It will be back in demand again. In the nearest future our country will have no other way but to develop nuclear power engineering," Mikhail Zhukovskiy told RusBusinessNews.

Independent ecologists do not have faith in hypothetical prospects of the use of waste uranium hexafluoride as very similar plans have been made for monazite. Stores with 82 thousand tons of this radioactive material are also in the Sverdlovsk Oblast in the town of Krasnoufimsk. These reserves, established in a hurry during the cold war for the production of nuclear charges, are not needed today and are left to the mercy of fate. The implementation of the project for processing monazite is pregnant with serious environmental risks and is not economically viable. Only in 2009 the regional authorities managed to fund the enclosure of all emergency stores by metal sheds which will ensure their relative safety for 50-100 years.

The radiation safety issue in the Urals region will not become any less acute with the cessation of uranium hexafluoride imports. At the moment there are 8 nuclear reactors, 6 radioactive materials processing centres, and 6 nuclear waste storage sites in the Urals.

Mikhail Zhukovskiy claims that "Today the normal operation of nuclear enterprises is such that beyond the buffer area the radiation virtually never exceeds natural radiation background. The current level of radiation exposure of the population through technogenic factors is negligible. The safety levels which we have today in our nuclear industry is much higher than in any other sector. All international standards and IAEA requirements are complied with."

Making these statements the experts stress the word "today". The largest nuclear disaster happened in the Urals in September 1957. At the production facility Mayak (the Chelyabinsk Oblast), as a result of thermochemical explosion radioactive products were discharged into the atmosphere, the total radioactivity of which amounted to about 40% of that at the Chernobyl disaster. The migration of the radioactive cloud had led to the pollution of parts of the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, and Tyumen Oblasts with the total area more than 23 thousand square kilometres. This radioactive pollution is referred to as the East Urals Radioactive Trace. The State still has not fully compensated the people living in the region who suffered as a result of this disaster.

Emergencies still do happen at nuclear sites in the Urals. Their scale is much smaller that the tragedy that happened 50 years ago, but they do happen regularly. At the very same Mayak in September 1998, when raising the capacity of the reactor, the levels of permitted water temperature in some technological channels have been exceeded and heat conducting elements leaked in three channels. The content of xenon-133 from the reactor in 10 days exceeded the annual permitted level.

Liquid oxygen exploded in cooling vessel at the condensation evaporation plant in October 1999 at the Ural Electrochemical Integrated Plant in Novouralsk. This contained 193 grams of uranium compounds with the mass fraction of uranium-235. The list of breakdowns and incidents can be continued.

Moreover, nuclear waste from nuclear power plants built by the Soviet Union in several Eastern European countries (Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria) is still shipped to Urals. Nuclear waste is processed at Mayak. After processing all imported nuclear waste must go back to the client.

Mikhail Zhukovskiy explains the situation, "When in the early 2000's Russian authorities permitted imports of irradiated fuel for the temporary storage and processing this was done to get the money for the processing of our own liquid radioactive waste. This logic is straight. There are 400 million cubic metres of liquid radioactive waste accumulated in Russia. It can not be buried in this state, this waste needs to be processed through vitrification, concentration, reduction. This requires money."

The problem is that one ton of processed nuclear waste generates further 150-200 tons of radioactive waste and nuclear industry still does not know how to resolve this problem. The total activity of waste accumulated by Mayak amounts to about 20 Chernobyl disasters, e.g. over a billion of Curie units.

Nuclear specialists call the nuclear waste processing a hi-tech business for which all of Russia should be fighting at the world's markets with such competitors as the British BNFL and the French Cogema. They call independent ecologists provocateurs and make accusations that their protests are there only to justify western grants and get Russia out of the world market of nuclear waste processing.

Olga Podosyonova admits "Yes, our organisation Ecodefence! does get small grants both from domestic and western donors. We regularly submit grant proposals to the Russian President, but there we are generally not noticed much. It is interesting, why nobody asks Rosatom about grants? ... Not many people know that the nuclear sector makes good money through grants from the West, and the sums of these grants cannot be compared to the grants that NGOs get. We have no salaried staff, our office is given to us gratis by people who support our ideas. The money we get is given to us for particular projects, for instance the implementation of the project for the protection of rivers, educational projects etc. We have never received any funding for our actions against nuclear waste imports."

Nuclear sites today are an important component of the Urals industry. They cannot be stopped by protest actions, nor can the 100% nuclear safety of the region be ensured. However, Rosatom's work requires strict control, even taking into account the high level of secrecy for all operating procedures. It is the lack of the proper control that has led, for instance, to the situation when the Europeans paid Russia for imported uranium hexafluoride the price of bakery products - about a dollar per kilo.

Pavel Kober