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RUSSIA OFFERS TO DISMANTLE FOREIGN NUCLEAR SUBMARINES

RIA Novosti

MOSCOW, April 18. (RIA Novosti)-The head of the Federal Agency for Nuclear Power, Alexander Rumyantsev, said on Sunday that Russia wanted to start dismantling foreign nuclear submarines. Russia does have the capacities to do this, Gazeta writes, but the question is: Where will the spent nuclear fuel from submarine reactors be stored?

Russia is currently dismantling only its own nuclear submarines, and doing so with foreign aid. Rumyantsev said Russia received $100 million a year for these purposes. In the space of five to six years, all of the remaining 80 Russian nuclear submarines will be scrapped, he said. Following that, the agency head said Russia would be ready to take U.S., British, and French submarines, which would save foreign partners considerable sums and bring in earnings for Russia.

Experts say this cooperation will keep the already existing plants used to dismantle submarines in work. Russia is currently scrapping vessels built between 1960 and 1970. This done, the capacities will be freed, says Ivan Safranchuk, director of the Center for Defense Information's Moscow office. There may be foreign demand for this service. But since the dismantling plants were built with foreign assistance, the interested countries, in Safranchuk's view, may demand a hefty discount when it comes to scrapping their submarines, which means Russian is unlikely to enjoy a windfall.

However, the main issue is, where to process and store spent nuclear fuel. Rumyantsev says as an initial arrangement it "should be unloaded in the countries that own the submarines." In other words, the idea is, when dismantling a foreign submarine, to keep radioactive waste in Russia in the future, believes Alexei Yablokov, head of the Center for Ecological Policy. But Russia does not need an excess radiation load, he says.

When a law was adopted in 2001 to allow Russia to store spent nuclear fuel, environmentalists also feared that it would be the first step toward turning Russia into a global nuclear dump. At the moment Russia only accepts and recycles spent fuel from reactors it itself built abroad.