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Geological Faults Risk Causing Major Radioactive Leak into Russian River - TV

Posted on: Saturday, 15 October 2005, 15:00 CDT

Excerpt from report by Russian Ren TV on 11 October

[Presenter] The Volga Region is on the brink of an ecological disaster. Environmentalists in Ulyanovsk Region are sounding alarm bells. The reason is an enormous underground repository of liquid radioactive waste located near the nuclear town of Dimitrovgrad. Scientists believe that radioactive waters can resurface any moment. Aleksandr Onosovskiy reports.

[Correspondent] Here, at a depth of approximately of 1,000 m., lies a real underground sea. A sea of liquid radioactive waste. Over 3m cu.m. of radioactive dirt is estimated to have built up there.

The underground repository has been around for over 25 years now. Nuclear industry specialists monitor the site regularly by taking groundwater samples out of 35 wells. Then these samples are tested in a special laboratory.

[Vyacheslav Usoltsev, chief nuclear safety specialist with Scientific Research Institute of Nuclear Reactors, captioned; institute is known to be based in Dimitrovgrad] The level of radionuclides detected in those samples is one-thousandth of the level that is considered radioactive.

[Correspondent] And yet the nuclear industry's own experts do not rule out the possibility that the waste pumped underground may resurface eventually. But this will not happen until 1,000 years from now at the earliest, they calculate. Independent environmentalists take a totally different view. The underground reservoir is already leaky [they say].

[Mikhail Piskunov, board chairman of the Centre for Assistance in Civil Initiatives, captioned] This is a rift area, the area of Mullovskiy rift which crosses another underlying rift which passes across the River Volga. Here it crosses the Cheremshanskiy bay of the Volga [Dimitrovgrad lies at end of Cheremshanskiy Bay; "Mullovskiy" traced to Mullovka near Cheremshanskiy bay]. It is an area where specialists believe the radioactive waste is already resurfacing. The scale of this is even greater than in the area where an industrial drainage system is leaking [apparent reference to leak of industrial waste reported in Ulyanovsk Region].

[Correspondent] The environmentalists demand that the nuclear industry convert liquid waste into solid before disposing of it. The technology to do that has been around for a long time. But the management of the nuclear centre [apparently Scientific Research Institute of Nuclear Reactors] dismisses that out of hand.

[Polyakov, chief research associate, captioned] This will be, again, about 1,000 times as expensive as pumping [liquid] waste down there.

[Correspondent] Meanwhile, the underground repository near Dimitrovgrad is expanding. Environmentalists say that even foreign liquid waste has started coming in. [Passage omitted to end: Correspondent says this method of disposal has been abandoned in the US]

Source: BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union

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