Nexus - 0402 - New Times Magazine-pages

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VY Dy © oF VEN? 21 NUCLEAR REACTORS DUMPED AT SEA places to store the waste on land, and, if financial aid is not forthcom- a ing, Russia will have no choice but to resume dumping it into the sea. The first signs that there could be trouble on the horizon came in early 1993 when seals in the White Sea and Barents Sea were found to be dying from blood cancer (leukaemia). Waste water from naval and civil- ian reactors was also dumped by special ships which diluted radioac- tive liquid with seawater. In fact, seamen would cut holes in the sealed containers if they would not sink. It is believed, according to the Yablokov report, that Russian nuclear submarines are continuing to dump liquid radioactive wastes at sea for lack of on-shore storage and reprocessing facilities. So far, Russia has saved an undisclosed amount of money by dumping the waste instead of having to build and operate expensive storage/recycling facilities. A subsurface plume of pollution from Lake Karachai, discharged from the Mayak facilities, is seeping towards the nearby Misheliak River at a rate of 80 metres per year and will soon reach the river. This represents nearly 50 times the radioactivity of the wastes dumped in the lhe extent and the precise SS locations of the former Soviet Union's nuclear pollution may forever remain a mystery. In the 1950s, the effluent from the nuclear-weapons factory near Chelyabinsk was dumped into the River Techa and ended up in the Arctic Ocean. Between 1964 and 1986, some 7,000 tons of solid radioactive waste (plutonium is radioactive waste) and 1,600 cubic metres of liquid waste was pitched into the Barents and Kara seas from the base in Murmansk which serviced the Soviet fleet of nuclear-powered naval and mer- chant ships. Russia's President Yeltsin ordered his top environmental advisor to produce a report on the matter. This report was released in March 1993. The Yablokov report states that the Soviet Union dumped an estimated 2.5 million curies of radioactive wastes in Arctic waters. This included 16 nuclear reactors (a Norwegian environmental group, Bellona, has identified 21 nuclear reactors, nine still containing their fuel rods) dumped in the shallow waters of the Barents and Kara seas, and the reactor from the nuclear-powered icebreaker, Lenin, sunk in 1967. An entire nuclear sub was deliberately cancer sunk after an accident in May 1968. In 1989, another nuclear submarine, the Komsomolets, sank 300 miles off Norway, with the loss of 42 sailors. It went down with two nuclear warheads. Finally, the Russians were dumping unprocessed nuclear waste into the Sea of Japan. As late as October 1993, the Russians confirmed that one of their ships discharged 900 tons of radioactive water from scrapped nuclear submarines. While Russia acknowledges that dump- ing nuclear waste into the ocean could be harmful, Moscow has warned the interna- tional community that it has run out of ocean. The US Congress appropriated $10 mil- lion to the Defense Department to organise a program for rapidly assessing the threat from the dumped Soviet wastes. However, America also owns some loaded nuclear reactors lying on the ocean bed. (Source: via the Internet, http-//gurukl.ucc.american.edu/TED/ARC- TIC.HTM) COLGATE PAYS OUT FOR FLUORIDE-RUINED TEETH resh calls to end fluoridation of water are to be put to the UK Government by a group of MPs led by Sir Ivan Lawrence, the Conservative member for Burton-on- Trent. Their action follows a decision in November 1996 by the toothpaste manu- facturer Colgate-Palmolive to make a ‘goodwill’ payment of £1,000 to a 10-year- old Essex boy suffering from dental fluo- rosis, a condition in which tooth enamel is mottled by fluoride. Sir Ivan, who has campaigned against fluoride for years, said: "This decision 6 = NEXUS , ee Fe FEBRUARY - MARCH 1997