According to official data, there is a storage ground of
radioactive waste in Angarsk. Great Britain, France and Germany
send their waste produced as a result of uranium enrichment to
Russia. One of the destinations for imported radioactive waste is
Angarsk (Irkutsk region).
Kommersant quotes the head of the Department for Environmental
Protection of the Administration of the Irkutsk region Anatoly
Malevsky as saying that there aren't sufficient capacities and
plants in Priangarie to reprocess spent nuclear waste.
However, we know there is a plant to enrich foreign waste
uranium hexafluoride (WUHF) in Angarsk. It's not a secret to
anybody. The Department for Environmental Protection aims to find
out if foreign uranium hexafluoride is transported to Angarsk and
if it's safe, as the containers with WUHF are transported by rail
through the cities of the Irkutsk region.
WUHF is transported and stored in cylindrical steel containers
(more than 10 tons each). They are stored at industrial sites in
the open air. The containers suffer corrosion, which, according to
the Ministry of Health Care, can result in their destruction.
As the Russian Federal Service for Supervision over Nuclear and
Radiation Safety reports, storage of containers with waste
hexafluoride uranium at industrial sites of Rosatom, including
Angarsk, does not meet current safety requirements.
In the framework of the international trade so called "uranium
tails" or waste uranium hexafluoride is imported to Russia -
depleted uranium with 0.3% concentration of the uranium-235 isotope
(in natural uranium, for example, its concentration is 0.7%). These
are tens of thousands of tons of waste, which is added to almost
500 thousand of tons of domestic "uranium tails" that are already
stored in Russia.
Nuclear officials think that most of radioactive materials are
exported back to the countries of their origin. But this is wrong.
Even regarding uranium 235 alone, only 30% of imported uranium-235
is taken back. All the rest, which is tens of thousands of tons of
WUHF or 90% of the initially imported "uranium tails" are left in
Russia for eternal storage.
Rosatom's representatives say that the rest of the WUHF will be
reprocessed to produce fluorine. But we know that so far there
haven't been necessary capacities and plants in Russia to reprocess
hazardous uranium hexafluoride into safer forms. The evidence is
hundreds of thousands of tons of domestic uranium hexafluoride that
nobody needs and that is stored in Angarsk, Novouralsk
(Sverdlovsk-44), Seversk (Tomsk-7), Zelenogorsk
(Krasnoyarsk-45).
This is supported by the fact that the conception of WUHF
management was developed only in 2001. However, judging by the fact
that things are right where they started, nothing is going to be
done in the framework of the conception. Recently, one of the
plants of Rosatom has started negotiations about purchasing
technologies of utilization of WUHF from the French company Cogema
- which, by the way, supplies Russia with "uranium tails".
Vladimir Chouprov, Greenpeace Russia
Uranium hexafluoride is a fluid that transforms into gas at
+56.4 degrees Celcium. This is an active chemical that reacts with
water, including atmospheric moisture. Once interacting with water,
etching acid and a fluorine and uranium compound are produced.
WUHF is hazardous to health: being inside the body uranium
causes radiation contamination as alpha-emitter (some experts
compare uranium dissemination in the environment to the danger of
lead). Etching acid is dangerous, if in contact with skin. Being
inhaled, the acid fumes damage the lungs and in the course of time
- kidneys.
There were accidents with the lethal cases in the history of
WUHF management, in particular in the former USSR.