Nuclear dump. Nuclear test sites of the world. How are you doing? Uncontrolled nuclear repository - in the center of Europe

Sakhalin Island east coast Asia is a far corner of Russia. This is the largest island in Russia, washed by the Sea of ​​Okhotsk and the Sea of ​​Japan. The name "Sakhalin" comes from the Manchu name of the Amur River - "Sakhalyan-Ulla", which means "Rocks of the Black River".

The public sounded the alarm when among the population Sakhalin region there has been an increase in oncological diseases. According to the Ministry of Health of the Sakhalin Region, the death rate from neoplasms (including malignant ones) per 100,000 population in 2016 amounted to 241 people, which is 5.6% higher than the previous year and 19% higher than the average for the Russian Federation, 7%.

The Sea of ​​Okhotsk around Sakhalin Island has long been turned into a huge nuclear dump. Only according to official data, in the period from 1969 to 1991. in Okhotsk and Seas of Japan at least 1.2 kCi of liquid RW was discharged ( radioactive waste), as well as solid radioactive waste (6868 containers, 38 ships and more than 100 individual large-sized objects, with a total activity of 6.9 kCi) were flooded.

Getting 1 Ki (curie) of strontium into the human body (for example, with infected fish) can lead to very serious consequences: cancer of the stomach, blood, bone marrow.

Sakhalin social activist, former director of Sakhalin-geoinform Vyacheslav Fedorchenko, referring to official documents of the Main Directorate of Navigation and Oceanography of the RF Ministry of Defense, told the deputies of the Sakhalin Regional Duma that by 1996, 39 RTGs had been flooded in the Sea of ​​Okhotsk by the Navy (near lighthouses and in the base area hydrographic detachments of the Navy). Until 1998, there was no regulatory document that would oblige them to hand over radioisotope generators for recycling. "Being in an aggressive marine environment, RITEG-type products self-destruct. Thus, a sharp increase in oncological diseases in the Far Eastern Federal District may be a consequence of the authorized disposal of RTGs by flooding,” he believes.

RITEG(radioisotope thermoelectric generator) - a radioisotope source of electricity that uses the thermal energy of radioactive decay. It was intended to power unattended automatically operating aids to navigation equipment - light beacons, radio beacons, luminous navigation signs, radar beacons-responders located in hard-to-reach areas sea ​​coast. Where the use of other power sources is difficult or practically impossible.

Compared to nuclear reactors using a chain reaction, RTGs are much smaller and structurally simpler. The output power of the RTG is low (up to several hundred watts) with a low efficiency. But they have no moving parts and require no maintenance for their entire service life, which can be decades.

By the way, in no case should you approach the RITEG closer than 500 meters! It was in Murmansk region a few years ago. Thieves who had access to the RTG storage site dismantled several generators. All parts, including the depleted uranium shield, were stolen. The perpetrators were never found. Scientists have suggested that they are guaranteed not to be alive, since they received a lethal dose of radiation.

According to V. Fedorchenko, a space satellite equipped with a nuclear power plant was also flooded near Sakhalin (an unsuccessful launch in 1993 from Baikonur), and a Tu-95 strategic bomber with two nuclear bombs, which crashed in 1976 in Patience Bay.

“Even now, virtually every fish caught contains radioisotope contamination with strontium-90 and cesium-133, which tend to accumulate in the human body. There is a law on the protection environment, which prohibits the dumping of radioactive waste into the sea, where flooded RTGs are classified as hazard class 1. This means that RITEGs must be found and properly disposed of. That is the law. Everything else is demagogy," V. Fedorchenko believes. He added that otherwise the flooded installations would pose a danger for another 600-800 years.

Today, according to Vyacheslav Fedorchenko, many departments have satellite images of the flooded Tu-95 strategic bomber with atomic bombs on board. This documentary evidence came about thanks to such a method as remote sensing of the Earth. With this method, you can find all sunken radioactive ships, submarines and aircraft. There are exact coordinates of a spacecraft with a nuclear power plant in Aniva Bay. The location of 5 out of 38 wrecked nuclear waste ships in Patience Bay is known. federal Service on Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Supervision, with its letter No. NYu-48/23, confirmed the flooding of nuclear facilities in certain areas of the Pacific Ocean.

The head of the hydrographic service of the Pacific Fleet, Gennady Nepomiluev, told the deputies of the Sakhalin Regional Duma that the Pacific Fleet (Pacific Fleet) in 2018 will continue to search for a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) flooded in the Sea of ​​Okhotsk.

He said that in the 1970-1990s, the Pacific Fleet had 148 RTGs on its balance sheet. Of these, 147 have now been decommissioned and transferred for temporary storage to the Far East Center for Radioactive Waste Management. For all installations, the Pacific Fleet has documents, where they are today and when they were disposed of.

One RTG in 1987, when delivered by helicopter to the lighthouse of the Pacific Fleet, was accidentally dropped into the sea near Cape Nizky due to adverse weather conditions and the risk of a helicopter crash. The coordinates of the flood are unknown. The search for a generator has been going on all these years, but no results have been given. Since 2012, the Pacific Fleet has been conducting annual monitoring in the area of ​​Cape Nizkiy - diving survey, echolocation, measurement of radiation levels, sampling of soil and water. G. Nepomiluev emphasizes that this area is closed for fishing and other industrial activities until the RTG is found.

The Sakhalin Regional Duma sent appeals to Rosatom and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation on this information from public figures, but these departments did not confirm the flooding of 39 RTGs, a bomber and a space satellite. However, the population of the region is concerned about the growth of cancer, and the reason for this trend is still unknown.

In 2013 the newspaper TVNZ"conducted its own investigation into the version of the sunken Tu-95 bomber with atomic bombs on board off the coast of Sakhalin. Agree or disagree with the results of the investigation, you decide. Link to the KP investigation.

It seems that the situation in the water area Sea of ​​Okhotsk, is hushed up by those who are not interested in disclosing this information. During the period of the collapse of the army and navy after the 90s, uniform anarchy was going on in the country, so it is not surprising that underwater radioactive burials. To hide the ends in the water is just the right expression. But this problem must be solved!

Deputies of the Sakhalin Regional Duma at a meeting of the regional parliament on May 3, 2018 adopted the text of an appeal to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Both appeals relate to the same topic - to consider the issue of ensuring radioecological safety Far Eastern seas and the need to lift potentially dangerous objects from the seabed. It remains to wait for decisions at the highest level.

For reference.

In October 2017, a meeting was held in Moscow working group"Ensuring environmental safety and rational use natural resources"as part of the State Commission for the Development of the Arctic, chaired by the Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology of the Russian Federation S.E. Donskoy. It was devoted to the state of objects flooded in the Arctic seas with radioactive waste (RW), spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and possible financing options At the meeting, it was announced that 17,000 containers and 19 ships with radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, five of which contain spent nuclear fuel, 735 units of radioactive structures were flooded in the Arctic seas. submarines, one of which is with unloaded SNF.
Author: Kantemirov Victor

When you start talking to someone about the US elections or "what's going on with crests" I often hear the answer: what's our business? Why are we discussing this so hard? Of course, I would have discussed this matter very strongly on the basis of the first example, but with regard to Ukraine, the conversation here is generally short - in general, everything that happens there is a couple of hundred kilometers away from me. And the city of Alekseevka, Belgorod region, always reminds me of this as the "Chernobyl zone." What are the neighbors' plans?

According to the agreements concluded earlier, SNF from the reactors of the South-Ukrainian, Rivne and Khmelnytsky nuclear power plants was sent for processing to Russia. As you know, only two states on the planet have technologies for deep processing of nuclear fuel: France and the Russian Federation. Ukrainian nuclear scientists could store spent fuel only temporarily, placing waste in the spent fuel pool located at the nuclear power plant. The so-called "wet" storage, in which spent nuclear fuel from Ukrainian reactors was stored, until the last moment existed only at the Zaporozhye station. Now Kyiv is talking about the construction of a huge “dry” burial ground on the territory of the Chernobyl zone, hushing up the chilling details of the prospects for further storage.

According to a specialist in the field of nuclear energy, former employee Ukrainian nuclear industry, and now - director of the fund historical research The “foundation” of Viktor Anpilogov, it was Westinghouse that lobbied in Kiev for the speedy completion of the construction of a new dry SNF storage facility, since the issue of disposing of its own accumulated waste for Westinghouse has long been on the agenda and is de facto critical.

The Ukrainian authorities are trying to present this whole story as a big breakthrough in eliminating energy and other dependence on Russia, which supplies fuel for Ukrainian nuclear power plants and then takes the resulting waste for processing. However the main problem is not at all that Kyiv, in pursuit of mythical savings in budgetary funds, is changing its supplier.

Uncontrolled nuclear repository - in the center of Europe

US law does not allow the storage of nuclear waste in the United States. In this regard, the hyperactive work of the American representatives in Kyiv is highly justified. Their work on promotion to the Ukrainian market would not make sense if the most pressing issue with the place of subsequent disposal of production waste was not resolved. In the case of the Kiev authorities, the problem of disposal of both spent nuclear fuel and all nuclear waste in the industry as a whole has actually already been solved, moreover, it is uncomplicated, simple and, in terms of the long term, extremely cheap: deadly radioactive materials will be subjected to banal disposal.

This process, obviously, will be controlled by American specialists - in connection with which international society quite rightly, and very soon questions will arise regarding the amount of spent nuclear fuel brought to the very heart of of Eastern Europe, and in terms of applying at least some control over the most dangerous object, and in terms of potential environmental impacts.

Kiev does not make a secret about the fact that the American company Holtec International has been involved in the construction of the dry burial ground, which previously had no experience in successfully implementing projects of this magnitude. In the international nuclear industry, Holtec International is known only as a manufacturer of special containers for spent nuclear fuel. What guided the Kyiv authorities when choosing a contractor - a question that, for obvious reasons, can be considered rhetorical.

Western storage facilities for radioactive materials have traditionally been located away from major cities, somewhere in salt mines or old mine workings. It was considered a reliable shelter in stable geological structures - however, only until recently: Germany is now sounding the alarm about cracks in the layers of one of the largest nuclear repositories. Water from underground sources penetrates into these cracks, but no one knows where the flows of dissolved radionuclides are then directed and where they will “float up”.

Meanwhile, the Chernobyl burial ground is an object of storing hazardous materials in layers close to the surface. Experts are perplexed by the degree of anti-terrorist protection, not to mention the potential threat of penetration of materials into ground and The groundwater. Just look at the map of Nezalezhnaya: the burial ground will be located not far from Kyiv and the main water artery of the country - the Dnieper River.

Assistant professor high school corporate governance of the RANEPA Ivan Kapitonov believes that radioactive waste, most likely, will simply be buried in the exclusion zone, because Kiev simply does not have technological processing capacities. Such, so to speak, "disposal", according to the expert, is dangerous both for the environment and from the point of view of the terrorist threat - there are hardly any professionals who want to protect the burial ground "smelling" with death, even for big money.

So who will be in charge of the security of the burial ground? And who is most interested in the implementation of this adventure, despite all the shortcomings of the project?

After them - even a flood

According to experts, the cost of construction can reach 800 million dollars. Funds will be kindly provided by banking structures from the United States - of course, for their own benefit. One can only guess how much the US economy will earn and how much more will be stolen in Kyiv, if the facility was started under President Kuchma and could not be completed for 15 years.

But what is alarming here is not so much the scale of corruption as the area of ​​the facility itself. The capacity of the new CSFSF, which will soon be put into operation on the territory of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, exceeds the needs of the Ukrainian nuclear industry. According to information about the first versions of the project, more than 16,500 spent fuel elements (TVELs) alone can be placed in the storage facility. Simply put, the volumes for which this facility is designed would be filled with waste from Ukrainian reactors alone for a very long time and very slowly. You do not need to be seven spans in the forehead to guess the true purpose of the new Chernobyl burial ground.

Russia has already warned the international community about the potential consequences of this project, including at discussion platforms at the UN. Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN Vitaly Churkin expressed the position of the Russian Federation simply and clearly: “Apparently, the infrastructure for the disposal of foreign waste is being prepared. In other words, we are talking about turning Ukraine into a nuclear dump by decision of its current authorities.”

In this whole story, the position of experts remains incomprehensible. International Agency for Nuclear Energy (IAEA): long years representatives of the international authority sought to check every millimeter at the facilities of the nuclear industry in Iran - and about the consequences of Fukushima and the Chernobyl CSFSF, they seemed to take water in their mouths. The logic of the development of events suggests that a biased core of functionaries has been formed in the IAEA, de facto helping to promote the policy of US national interests. No one is in a hurry to present versions convincingly explaining other motives to the general international community.

It turns out that Washington Once again demonstrates the deadly cynical essence of his foreign policy doctrine: "The problems that arise after America's actions not on American soil are not America's problems."

How much was stolen

It can be said without exaggeration that Chernobyl has become a gold mine for Ukrainian officials. Initially, the construction of the protective arch was estimated at $700 million, but in the end, only through the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Ukraine received about 1.54 billion euros over the years. As Viktor Yanukovych, who was then acting prime minister of the country, ironically noted in his time,

The West allocated so much money to Ukraine for the arch that it was possible to completely cover the entire city of Pripyat on them - however, the construction of financed international organizations objects passed at a snail's pace. Even now, when the Minister of Ecology Ostap Semerak announced with pathos the opening of the protective arch, which will take place on November 3, the construction of this facility is still far from being completed. It is expected that the arch will be fitted to the reactor before the end of the year, and Ukrainian engineers are already saying that, since this is a unique structure that has no analogues in the world, it is quite possible that during the installation process, some design changes- for which, of course, you can ask for more Western money.

However, if some progress can still be seen in the construction of the arch over the sarcophagus, then the creation of the ISF has practically not moved forward since 2003 - although after the Orange Revolution, the Ukrainian government, represented by Viktor Yushchenko, announced its intention to begin commercial purchases of nuclear fuel by Westinghouse Electric Company , and the first commercial loading of Westinghouse fuel collectors into the third power unit of the South Ukrainian NPP took place in April 2010, already under pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych - who defiantly sanctioned a course to continue cooperation with Westinghouse - mainly due to the active lobbying policy of this company, which does not hide its intention to capture the Ukrainian nuclear energy market, and worked with all the leading representatives of the Kiev political elites.

And the question of where to put the spent fuel at the South Ukraine NPP is already facing Ukraine squarely.

sources

All countries developing nuclear power industry are divided into two camps on the issue of spent nuclear fuel management. Some of these valuable raw materials are processed - for example, France and Russia. Others, who do not have the appropriate level of processing technology, tend to long-term storage. The latter include the United States, which has the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the world.
Initially, the United States had a plan recycling fuel, which provided for the separation of uranium and plutonium and the disposal of only short-lived fission products into dumps. This would reduce waste by 90%.

But President Gerald Ford banned such reprocessing in 1976 because of the danger of plutonium proliferation, and his successor Jimmy Carter confirmed this decision. In the United States, they decided to follow the concept of an open fuel cycle.

Nuclear waste is stored in dry storage at the National Laboratory in Idaho. More than 60,000 tons of spent fuel are temporarily stored at 131 points in the country, mainly at operating reactors.

It was expected that the Yucca Mountain storage facility would solve the problem of nuclear waste disposal in the United States.

Dead-end tunnels in which waste containers will be located. Their shelf life will be measured in tens of thousands of years.

The repository is located on federal lands adjacent to the Nevada nuclear test site in Nye County, Nevada, about 130 km northwest of Las Vegas, where about 900 atomic explosions. The vault is located in Yucca Mountain, a mountain range in south-central Nevada. The ridge is composed of volcanic material (mostly tuff) ejected from the now-cooled supervolcano. The storage at Yucca Mountain will be located inside a long ridge, about 1,000 feet below the surface and 1,000 feet above the water table, and will have 40 miles of tunnels. The capacity will be approximately 77,000 tons of nuclear waste.
However, 22 years after construction began, the $9 billion project was closed. Many now believe that the best solution is to do nothing in the near future.

Background

Construction history nuclear storage in the Yucca Mountains began in 1957, when the American National Academy of Sciences issued a recommendation for the creation of reservoirs in geological formations for nuclear materials, including: such objects should be located in solid rocks and in a safe place, protected from natural Disasters, away from large settlements and sources of fresh water.

First normative act The United States, regulating this area, was a law adopted in 1982. In particular, it was envisaged that energy companies should deduct 0.1 cents from each kilowatt-hour of energy to the federal Nuclear Waste Trust Fund. The state, for its part, undertook to find places for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. The Department of Energy forced the companies to sign contracts and promised to start accepting payments in January 1998 (the estimated completion date for the project at the time).

Construction planning and exploration of this region has been underway since the early 1980s. For some time it was planned to organize a storage facility for radioactive waste in Def Smith County, but this idea was later abandoned in favor of Yucca Mountain. Arrowhead Mills founder Jesse Frank Ford led the Def-Smith protests, arguing that the presence of a waste dump could contaminate the Ogallala aquifer, West Texas' main source of drinking water.
The repository was supposed to open in 1998. At present, the main tunnel, 120 meters long, and several small tunnels have been dug. The US Department of Energy (DOE) submitted a construction license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008.

Now experts say that even if the project is resumed - and this is still a big question - construction can be continued no earlier than 2013. Only the main tunnel with a length of 120 m and several dead ends have been dug. In July 2006, management announced that all work would be completed by 2017.

However, politics intervened again. During the presidential campaigns in 2004 and 2008, Democratic candidates promised to shut down the project if they won. In 2006, congressional elections were held in the United States, as a result, Democrats won the majority in parliament. Their leader, Harry Reid, represents Nevada and has been an opponent of the state's supporters of the storage facility for years. At a press conference on the issue, the senator said: "This project will never come back to life."

In 2009, the Obama administration announced that the project was closed and proposed to stop its funding from the state budget. The refusal to continue the construction of a strategically important facility for the country caused a lot of lawsuits from representatives of the nuclear industry and municipalities where temporary warehouses of radioactive waste are located. The opposite position was taken federal authorities, Nevada and a number of environmental and community groups

sad prospect

Speaking to reporters a few months ago, First Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell said that his office believes it is necessary to triple the number of nuclear power plants in the country by 2050, bringing it to 300. Recognizing that to achieve the task after a 30-year break in the construction of such facilities will not be easy, he paid special attention to the problem of storing radioactive waste. Unless the industry improves dramatically, Sell said, the country will have to build nine more storage facilities like Yucca Mountain this century.

Naturally, all countries involved in nuclear programs faced the difficult problem of disposing of by-products and waste. However, in the former Soviet Union, on the orders of Stalin, large-scale nuclear research was launched right in Moscow.

Once, in the car workshop of Viktor Abramov, an ordinary resident of the Russian capital, which is located near the fence of a large factory, specialists from the radiation control service appeared and warned him about the danger that he experiences when he goes to his place of work.

“They told me that you can walk along the road,” Viktor recalls, pointing in the direction of a dirt road descending to the Moscow River, “but they warned me to keep to the left, since there is a source of radiation danger on the right.”

Viktor Abramov works alongside the dangerous legacy of the early years of the race nuclear weapons - big dump radioactive waste, located right in a huge metropolis.

In general, it should be noted that on the territory of the former Soviet Union work to find and extract radioactive waste is carried out not only near the plutonium-producing reactors in Siberia and the Urals, and not only at the test site in Kazakhstan, where the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated in 1949.

Such searches are also being conducted in busy Moscow - right next to government agencies, factories, enterprises, railway stations, highways and residential buildings.

All this is a direct consequence of the striving of the Soviet authorities to uncover the secrets of the atom as quickly as possible, by all means. Naturally, all countries involved in nuclear programs faced the difficult problem of disposing of by-products and waste. However, in the former Soviet Union, on the orders of Stalin, large-scale nuclear research was launched not just anywhere, but right in the most densely populated place in the center of the country - in Moscow.

"Creation program nuclear bomb, atomic bomb started in Moscow, "says in an interview with the newspaper" The New York Times" Dr. Sergey Dmitriev, who is CEO Moscow regional branch of "Radon", a little-known government agency responsible for finding, extracting and secure storage radioactive waste.

"Radon" is engaged in the elimination of the consequences of the time when researchers, working in conditions of totalitarian secrecy, were not fully aware of the danger posed by radiation. During that period, a whole network of institutes and factories was created, at which they thought little about what to do with radioactive waste. These objects left behind a whole set of radiation-emitting waste.

According to Alexander Barinov, chief engineer of the Moscow city branch of Radon, over the past years, more than 1,200 radiation sources have been discovered in Moscow, for the safety of which no one is responsible. A further development Moscow further aggravated the situation.

Part of the radioactive material accumulated in factories and laboratories. A large amount of it was hastily taken to the forests near Moscow, which were at that time outside the city limits. Moscow grew, covering all new areas with its borders, including those where radioactive waste dumps were located.

"Over time, residential buildings and administrative buildings began to be built in such places," says Dmitriev. Radon, which has a network of twelve regional radioactive waste storage centers throughout Russia, was created in 1961, more than ten years after it began to generate radioactive waste, which had been stored uncontrolled all this time. The work was intensified in 1986 after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Then "Radon" was given the task of searching for radioactive waste in populated areas.

The Moscow progress map shows that such landfills have been found in many parts of the capital, from the Garden Ring to metro stations and residential areas on the outskirts.

Experts say that Radon extracts and stores only waste with an average and low content of radioactive substances. Since these materials do not break down, they cannot cause a chain reaction leading to nuclear explosion. The danger of such materials is that they emit radiation dangerous to humans. The level of danger posed by materials with an average and low content of radioactive substances to human health has not yet been precisely established.

Radon representatives simply state that a significant part of such material can pose a health hazard, and therefore its search and removal is important not only from the point of view of health protection, but also in order to exclude the possibility of using this material to carry out terrorist attacks.

Radon's management notes that medium radioactive sources sometimes contain enough radioactive material to create so-called "dirty bombs".

Since 1996, Radon has been responsible for radiation monitoring of new construction sites when workers dig up long-forgotten radioactive waste. Radon also removes unnecessary sources of radiation from hospitals, institutes, factories and nine nuclear research reactors in the capital.

In addition, according to the leaders of Radon, the organization is working on several old radioactive waste dumps, where cleaning has not yet been completed.

After removing the waste, they are taken to a special burial site located 80 kilometers northeast of Moscow in the Sergiev Posad area. Part of the waste is incinerated high temperature and turns into a material resembling slag, which is shaped into bricks. Ashes and ashes are mixed with cement. Then all this material is buried, and cement, clay and soil are laid on top in several layers to prevent the spread of radiation. Part of the ongoing work is funded by the United States, which considers such interaction as an important area of ​​​​cooperation in security matters.

"The Russians face a task of daunting proportions," said Paul M. Longsworth, deputy head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the US Department of Energy, during a recent visit to Moscow.

Abandoned radioactive materials are found from time to time in cities around the world. To help Radon secure radioactive material that could be used to carry out terrorist attacks, the National Nuclear Security Administration is supplying it with equipment, security upgrades and training.

Edward McGuinis, director of the agency's Global Radioactive Threat Reduction Division, said in a telephone interview: "On any day when such sources are not secured or only partially secured, they can be used by intruders."

Last fall, the department completed work to improve the security system at the storage facility for the most dangerous radioactive waste, owned by Radon. New barriers and barriers, fencing, locks, video surveillance and video recording equipment, and other elements were installed to prevent the loss and theft of radioactive waste. The modernization of the security system is especially visible in the waste storage center in Sergiev Posad, located next to Dmitriev's office. There, behind the gates, the most dangerous radioactive materials are buried.

The center is reminiscent of an aircraft hangar, with a concrete floor, with circular covers in rows, each the diameter of a sewer hatch. Under each cover is a vertical underground passage seven meters deep. This is where radioactive materials are buried.

"Radon" regularly receives more and more new waste. Extraction of radioactive soil and other waste continues and is underway at several sites in Moscow, including the Kurchatov Institute, a nuclear research center that emerged in the Stalin era in the forest next to an artillery range. Today the institute is located in the city limits of rapidly growing Moscow.

Another operating facility is a polymetal plant located in the south-west of Moscow next to Viktor Abramov's car repair shop.

Last fall, an entire factory building was dismantled, removed and buried at the Radon dump. However, according to Radon representatives, contaminated soil still remains, including a large embankment that slopes down to the Moskva River directly opposite the Bochkarev brewery.

Abramov and another person who works near the plant say that experts from Radon came to them, but they did not say what kind of production or research were carried out in a dismantled building, and what is the level of radiation at the facility. Eduard Shingarev, representative Federal Agency By Atomic Energy, said that the plant produces control rods for nuclear reactors, and thor and uranium are extracted from the ore. A spokesman for the company declined to comment. "We have a closed facility," he explained. US officials say the Stalinist legacy of having so much unsecured radioactive waste accumulated in the capital is not typical of other countries. However, in a broader sense Russian problem radioactive legacy is not a unique phenomenon.

The opposing side in the arms race across the ocean also sometimes carried out its work in the cities. So, for example, in 1942, when the American government had not yet decided to conduct nuclear tests far from populated areas, the first man-made nuclear reaction, was held on the tennis court at the University of Chicago.

The US Department of Energy, on average, detects three dangerous sources of radioactive contamination in the country on average per week. And it doesn't detect in isolated or remote locations.

Four sources of strontium-90 have been found in Houston this year, McGinis said. It happened just at the moment when the city hosted the 38th American Football National Championship.

However, the problem of radiation in the city of Moscow is a problem much more high order. Sometimes residents have to assess the safety of their place of residence or work. Viktor Abramov takes a specific position on this issue.

Working shirtless and covered in automotive grease, he says he doesn't worry too much about the radiation around the workshop. "I'm from Moldova, and I drink Moldovan wine," Victor says, "it is known that wine cleanses the body. Therefore, I am not afraid of radiation."

All countries developing nuclear power industry are divided into two camps on the issue of spent nuclear fuel management. Some of these valuable raw materials are processed - for example, France and Russia. Others, who do not have the appropriate level of processing technology, tend to long-term storage. The latter include the United States, which has the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the world.
Initially, the United States had a plan for the recycling of fuel, which provided for the separation of uranium and plutonium and the removal of only short-lived fission products to the dumps. This would reduce waste by 90%.

But President Gerald Ford banned such reprocessing in 1976 because of the danger of plutonium proliferation, and his successor Jimmy Carter confirmed this decision. In the United States, they decided to follow the concept of an open fuel cycle.

Nuclear waste is stored in dry storage at the National Laboratory in Idaho. More than 60,000 tons of spent fuel are temporarily stored at 131 points in the country, mainly at operating reactors.

It was expected that the Yucca Mountain storage facility would solve the problem of nuclear waste disposal in the United States.

Dead-end tunnels in which waste containers will be located. Their shelf life will be measured in tens of thousands of years.

The repository is located on federal lands adjacent to the Nevada nuclear test site in Nye County, Nevada, about 130 km northwest of Las Vegas, where about 900 atomic explosions have taken place. The vault is located in Yucca Mountain, a mountain range in south-central Nevada. The ridge is composed of volcanic material (mostly tuff) ejected from the now-cooled supervolcano. The storage at Yucca Mountain will be located inside a long ridge, about 1,000 feet below the surface and 1,000 feet above the water table, and will have 40 miles of tunnels. The capacity will be approximately 77,000 tons of nuclear waste.
However, 22 years after construction began, the $9 billion project was closed. Many now believe that the best solution is to do nothing in the near future.

Background

The history of the construction of a nuclear storage facility in the Yucca Mountains began in 1957, when the American National Academy of Sciences prepared a recommendation for the creation of storage facilities for nuclear materials in geological formations, including: such facilities should be located in solid rocks and in a safe place, protected from natural disasters. disasters, away from large settlements and sources of fresh water.

The first US regulation regulating this area was a law passed in 1982. In particular, it was envisaged that energy companies should deduct 0.1 cents from each kilowatt-hour of energy to the federal Nuclear Waste Trust Fund. The state, for its part, undertook to find places for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. The Department of Energy forced the companies to sign contracts and promised to start accepting payments in January 1998 (the estimated completion date for the project at the time).

Construction planning and exploration of this region has been underway since the early 1980s. For some time it was planned to organize a storage facility for radioactive waste in Def Smith County, but this idea was later abandoned in favor of Yucca Mountain. Arrowhead Mills founder Jesse Frank Ford led the Def-Smith protests, arguing that the presence of a waste dump could contaminate the Ogallala aquifer, West Texas' main source of drinking water.
The repository was supposed to open in 1998. At present, the main tunnel, 120 meters long, and several small tunnels have been dug. The US Department of Energy (DOE) submitted a construction license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008.

Now experts say that even if the project is resumed - and this is still a big question - construction can be continued no earlier than 2013. Only the main tunnel with a length of 120 m and several dead ends have been dug. In July 2006, management announced that all work would be completed by 2017.

However, politics intervened again. During the presidential campaigns in 2004 and 2008, Democratic candidates promised to shut down the project if they won. In 2006, congressional elections were held in the United States, as a result, Democrats won the majority in parliament. Their leader, Harry Reid, represents Nevada and has been an opponent of the state's supporters of the storage facility for years. At a press conference on the issue, the senator said: "This project will never come back to life."

In 2009, the Obama administration announced that the project was closed and proposed to stop its funding from the state budget. The refusal to continue the construction of a strategically important facility for the country caused a lot of lawsuits from representatives of the nuclear industry and municipalities where temporary warehouses of radioactive waste are located. The opposite position was taken by the federal authorities, the state of Nevada and a number of environmental and public groups.

sad prospect

Speaking to reporters a few months ago, First Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell said that his office believes it is necessary to triple the number of nuclear power plants in the country by 2050, bringing it to 300. Recognizing that to achieve the task after a 30-year break in the construction of such facilities will not be easy, he paid special attention to the problem of storing radioactive waste. Unless the industry improves dramatically, Sell said, the country will have to build nine more storage facilities like Yucca Mountain this century.