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State Duma Deputy Sergei Mitrokhin posing at the Krasnoyarsk
plant, where a consignment of spent nuclear fuel is being stored.
The controversy surrounding a consignment of spent nuclear fuel
imported from Bulgaria last year is set to hit the courts, with
environmentalists accusing the company that imported the fuel
of exploiting a loophole in the law to bypass new safety requirements.
Greenpeace Russia has filed suit in a Moscow district court saying
that the import of some 41 tons of spent nuclear fuel in November
from the Kozlodui nuclear plant in Bulgaria is illegal and demanding
that it be sent back. The consignment is currently being stored
at the Krasnoyarsk Mining and Chemical Plant in western Siberia.
Greenpeace said the state-owned Tekhsnabexport company, which
was responsible for the deal, did not submit its plans to ecological
experts as is required under a new law on importing spent nuclear
fuel.
The new law, signed by President Vladimir Putin in July, allows
the import of spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing and storage
but stipulates that nuclear importers must present their plans
for examination by the ecological department of the Natural Resources
Ministry.
"The federal law demands that such industrial and business
ventures undergo ecological examination before being implemented,"
said Vladimir Chuprov, a Greenpeace campaigner and one of the
plaintiffs in the case. "Neither the contract nor the project
were examined by ecologists, although Gosatomnadzor [the state
nuclear safety watchdog] demanded this in November."
The Natural Resources Ministry's ecological department confirmed
Tekhsnabexport had not submitted its import plan. "Nothing
of that kind ever appeared here," said the department's deputy
head, Marianna Novikova. "Well, there was a call from the
Nuclear Power Ministry a month ago asking us to conduct an examination
of the project, but nobody came and brought it to us."
But Alexei Lebedev, the head of Tekhsnabexport's project department,
said that because the import deal was cut between Tekhsnabexport
and the Kozlodui power station in 2000, the new law did not apply
to the project.
At the time that the deal was struck, the import of spent nuclear
fuel was illegal in Russia, but Tekhsnabexport went ahead with
it expecting that a law allowing nuclear imports would be passed
in 2001. So now to claim that the new law does not apply appears
to undermine the logic of the earlier decision to go ahead with
the deal.
Lebedev said the Kozlodui deal falls under a treaty on nuclear
imports that Russia signed with Bulgaria in 1995. This treaty
cannot be overruled by subsequent legal innovations, he said.
"We cannot tell the Bulgarians to pay for the ecological
examination because there wasn't anything about it in the original
agreement," he said this week. "And the import contract
for Kozlodui was signed in 2000, when legislation did not demand
the ecological examination of the venture."
Lebedev added that according to the Civil Code, if a newly adopted
law does not provide for changes to earlier signed contracts,
the contracts retain their legal validity. And the new legislation
on nuclear imports does not demand such changes, he said.
The Nuclear Power Ministry also insisted that the spent nuclear
fuel was imported legally. The Kozlodui contract was signed before
the new law was introduced, and because the new law is not retroactive,
it does not block old contracts, said Nikolai Shingaryov, the
ministry's spokesman. "There was a special procedure for
the import of spent nuclear fuel to Russia that was worked out
in 1995," Shingaryov said. "Until the new procedure
is introduced, we will follow the older one in our work."
The delay in updating safety procedures for importing nuclear
fuel has left the new law in limbo, critics say.
Gosatomnadzor, which ordered Tekhsnabexport to undergo an ecological
examination of the Kozlodui project, said the temporary legal
loophole allows nuclear importers not to follow its orders. When
Putin signed the new law in July, he ordered a committee to be
formed to make recommendations on updating nuclear safety procedures.
However, this committee has yet to be set up, said Sergei Shcherbakov,
the adviser to the head of Gosatomnadzor.
Sergei Mitrokhin, a State Duma deputy from the liberal Yabloko
faction who is to serve on the presidential committee, said last
week the committee cannot start its work because the Federation
Council is late in appointing representatives to it.
Shingaryov said the committee is expected to start working in
March and will submit its recommendations to the government in
April.
Lebedev said he expected the new procedures to be worked out
by October. In the meantime, Tekhsnabexport would apply to the
Justice Ministry with a request to clarify nuclear import procedures,
he said.
The issue of nuclear safety was put back in the spotlight last
week when Yabloko's Mitrokhin, along with two Greenpeace activists
and three NTV cameramen, broke into the Krasnoyarsk plant where
the spent nuclear fuel from Bulgaria is being stored. The break-in,
broadcast in an NTV special report, was designed to show that
the country's system of nuclear safety is not just poor but "nonexistent,"
Mitrokhin said.
Advocates of spent nuclear fuel imports argue that Russia could
earn $20 billion over the next decade by importing some 20,000
tons of spent nuclear fuel. But opponents, spearheaded by Greenpeace,
have protested the plan, saying the environmental damage caused
by the imports will outweigh the financial benefits.
See also:
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