#12
Paris Daily Reporter on Lax Security for Radioactive Materials in Russia

Le Monde
22 December 2001
[translation for personal use only]
Report by Moscow correspondent Natalie Nougayrede:
"Russia Monitors Its Stocks of Radioactive Products and Chemical Weapons Poorly"
--first paragraph is Le Monde introduction

Russia does not monitor its stocks of radioactive products and chemical weapons well.

Moscow-The six men, one of whom was a member of the Russian services who had infiltrated the group, were standing near the "Harvest" caf? that evening, 8 December, in the suburb of Balachikha southeast of Moscow. The merchandise they wanted to sell was one kilogram and 68 grams of uranium-235 in the form of tablets. The asking price: $30,000. Their arrest by the police led to a few short paragraphs in the press. The degree of enrichment of the seized uranium, which is a crucial detail for knowing whether it could help manufacture a bomb, was not revealed. The result of the expert analysis would not come "for a month," one police source told us.

"There is nothing accidental about this case," Vladimir Chouprov, one of Greenpeace's officials in Russia, said, in an office full of files. "It is the result of the situation that this country finds itself in in general, and the nuclear sector in particular. There is old equipment, terrible salaries that make corruption easier, and alcoholism. Furthermore MINATOM (the nuclear energy ministry) is one of the most closed and most secretive agencies. What we are learning is only the tip of the iceberg."

Mr. Chouprov enumerated the different sources of uranium-235 in the country, ranging from the best guarded sites to those that presented the greatest risks. They were, in order: the 6,000 nuclear warheads from Russia's nuclear arsenal, the 30 or so nuclear power plants, the 80 nuclear submarines that have reverted to the state in the Kola Peninsula's (northern) ports, and, finally, the research institutes spread across the country, some of which have experimental nuclear reactors.

The possibility cannot be ruled out that the uranium that was seized in Balachikha came from one of the three institutes of this kind that the Moscow area has (Kurchatovsky, Troitsky, and Obninsk). In Balachikha in March 2001, the police proceeded to arrest a criminal group that was trying to sell 200 grams of cesium-137, a radioactive material.

After 11 September, President Vladimir Putin stepped up the reassuring statements about the security of sensitive Russian sites. "What risk are people talking about?" he said recently. "We are talking about the use of weapons of mass destruction that terrorists might seize, chemical, biological weapons, etc. Russia is convinced that this should remain a topic for serious thought." During his recent trip to the United States, Mr. Putin said that stocks of biological weapons were "safe" and termed a "myth" the notion that terrorist might have been able to get hold of portable Russian nuclear bombs.

Two recent developments worry ecologists, for whom, on the contrary, the risks of proliferation are heightened. On the one hand, Moscow has started to implement its program to import 20,000 tonnes of nuclear waste over 10 years, which was decided on last year despite a wave of protests.

A 40-tonne shipment of radioactive waste coming from Bulgaria happened this past 9 November, via barges on the Danube up to the port of Ismail in Ukraine, then by train to Krasnoiarsk, in Siberia. The thousands of kilometers that were covered, the cars' uncertain security conditions, and also the opaque financing channels that were involved have raised concerns.

On the other hand, the issue of the destruction of Russian chemical weapons (40,000 tonnes, the biggest arsenal in the world) is experiencing new delays. In early December Russia announced that it was not able to liquidate those stocks of toxic weapons before 2007, as it had pledged to do by signing the international 1997 convention. The new deadline is 2012.

It is in Gorny, a remote community in the Volga region, that the first plant where chemical weapons will be eliminated is supposed to open (in May 2002, according to the authorities). But Russian financing, which was supposed to supplement European aid from the Tacis program, has been slow to materialize. So we are only at the very beginning of an interminable process, with just 2.9 percent of the total of the toxic stock supposed to be processed in Gorny. The other two expected plants, in Shoushey (Ural) and Gambarka (Oudmourtie), exist on paper only.

Some western aid programs exist. US assistance to Cheliabinsk to reduce stocks of plutonium can be mentioned as well as the payment of decent wages to nuclear scientists in the "closed cities" so they will not be tempted by offers of jobs in Syria or Iraq; and also European aid to monitor radioactive sites in the Murmansk region. But these are only drops of water, and certain initiatives have been hit by budget cuts.

More broadly speaking, fear exists that with Russia's return to acceptance with Westerners, ever since Mr. Putin positioned himself as an "ally" in the world antiterrorist campaign, it may have become even more complicated to follow the Russian authorities' actions in the area of non-proliferation. "Since the US wants to maintain good relations with Russia, any information on the possibility that terrorists might seize highly toxic substances in Russia is perceived as a criticism," said Chouprov, the Russian Greenpeace representative.

However one Russian expert who cannot be suspected of complacency toward the authorities, since he was charged with "divulging state secrets" post-1991, for having signed an article on the Russian biological and chemical weapons programs, stated that, on these issues, one should not see everything in negative terms. Lev Fiodorov, a chemistry professor, is the chairman of a small association (the "Union for Chemical Safety," which publishes information on the size of toxic stocks in Russia). "Four hundred sites exist where chemical weapons are kept. Many have been kept secret. The real quantity is 170,000 tonnes, according to our data. The official figure of 40,000 tonnes of chemical weapons covers only those produced by the USSR after 1946," he said. "But when it comes to biological weapons, they are under fairly good monitoring, and kept in five institutes, three of which are military. For a terrorist to get his hands on this, there would need to be widespread complicity, you would have to buy the whole chain leading to the product," he said.