Contamination at Russian nuke weapons plant 'staggering' By IAN TRAYNOR The Guardian November 02, 2000

MOSCOW - Radioactive contamination of rivers around a top-secret nuclear weapons complex in Siberia has reached "staggering" levels, the worst ever monitored, and is out of "rational control," a joint team of Russian and U.S. radiation monitors said Thursday.

Following a monitoring expedition in July and August to the area around the closed complex at Seversk, near Tomsk in western Siberia, the Russian and U.S. nuclear watchdogs said they had registered alarming levels of radioactivity in tributaries of the River Ob, a key Siberian waterway.

"We've never encountered such radiation. It's the worst contamination we've found," said Sergei Pashchenko, an atmospheric pollution expert who headed the Russian side of the survey carried out by Siberian Scientists for Global Responsibility and Government Accountability Project.

The director of the U.S. adjunct group, Tom Carpenter, said: "We were shocked at the levels of contamination."

The environmentalists said they found levels of cesium and strontium-90 vastly exceeding safety levels in the rivers Tom and Romashka close to the Siberian Chemical Complex, a sprawling facility established by the former Soviet Union in the 1950s to make weapons-grade plutonium for warheads.

Even more disturbingly, said Pashchenko, plant life in the rivers contained high levels of phosphorus-32, which decays within a couple of weeks, meaning the radioactive effluent was of very recent origin whereas the strontium and the cesium could date back to the 1960s.

Seversk, a closed town, is effectively a suburb of Tomsk, a city with a population of half a million in western Siberia. Seversk was established in 1949, at the very onset of the superpowers' nuclear arms race. It ranked among the top three sites for the manufacturing of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium enrichment for the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War.

The plutonium was manufactured from five nuclear reactors commissioned between 1955 and 1967. The three oldest reactors were closed between 1990 and 1992. Under a 1992 U.S.-Russian agreement aimed at halting plutonium production, all five reactors should have been closed down by this year.

But two reactors are still operating, providing heating and electricity to Tomsk. "The authorities have no intention of closing them," Igor Forofontov, a radiation specialist with the group Greenpeace in Moscow.Forofontov said.

Forofontov said lethal amounts of radioactivity were leaking into the soil and the water in the region because of the practice of storing waste from the reactors in liquid form, which is then pumped deep below ground.

"The nuclear waste is being piped straight into the environment," said Norm Buske, an American oceanographer and physicist who was among the monitors. "This has not been done anywhere in the world since the Cold War."

http://www.gomemphis.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=RADIOACTIVE-11-02-00&cat=II

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), November 02, 2000