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Russia needs tighter nuclear checks, watchdog says
February 20, 2003

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia must urgently reform the way it accounts for and safeguards its nuclear stockpile if it is to keep track of thousands of tons of radioactive material, the country's nuclear watchdog said Thursday.

"The current accounting system needs serious improvement," Yuri Vishnevsky, the director of Gosatomnadzor, told reporters.

"In many companies the system is the same as how it was in our grandparents' time, when a woman sits with a book and writes down how much she gave to whom."

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, generous government funding for nuclear facilities dried up and security at even the most secret plants became porous.

Since 1991, there have been several cases of stolen nuclear material. One of the most serious incidents was in 1994, when three men were arrested at Munich airport in Germany, carrying 13 ounces of Russian weapons-grade plutonium.

"In 2002, there were two or three cases when people tried to steal radioactive material from factories. It was found, although not all the people involved were detained," he said.

Vishnevsky said the scale of Russia's nuclear industry made it extremely hard for officials to keep track of precise quantities -- one reason there are fears that material for weapons could make its way to terrorist groups.

He said Russia's only civilian reprocessing plant, shut down last month over fears radioactive water was tainting local water supplies, could regain its operating licence.

"We have a few more questions, and if they answer them we will give a licence by the end of March," he said.

The reprocessing plant at the Mayak facility in the Urals mountains currently dumps medium and low radioactive waste into specially built reservoirs, but ecologists have warned they could overflow in the spring thaw and taint local farmland.

Mayak had the worst nuclear disaster in Russia in 1957 when hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to radiation. Greenpeace says it is one of the most polluted places on earth.

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