Campaign to stave off nuclear threat

Date: 18/04/1996

LEADERS from the G7 powers and officials from the EU are looking to this weekend's meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow to take the next crucial next step towards global nuclear safety.

But while the nations attending the meeting are expected to endorse a new International Nuclear Safety Convention - making safety their highest priority and laying the basis for a guaranteed policy of non-proliferation and a clamp-down on illicit trafficking in nuclear materials - peace and safety campaigners are calling for the summit to go much further.

A group of nuclear experts, led by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Rotblat, called last week for the rapid shutdown of all the old Soviet-designed reactors, tougher controls on nuclear materials and more rapid disarmament, claiming that checks on stocks of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium were insufficient.

This weekend's meeting, co-chaired by Yeltsin and French President Jacques Chirac, falls exactly a week before the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

It also comes in the wake of warnings from the European Nuclear Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Soviet-designed reactors still pose a major safety risk and that urgent action is required to stave off the threat of another major accident.

Some 15 Chernobyl-type reactors are still in use, 11 in Russia, two in Lithuania and two at Chernobyl itself.

The environmental pressure group Greenpeace has echoed these warnings and expressed fears that the meeting will not do enough to avert the threat.

“The political, economic and strategic interests of most of the G7 and Russia means that no real effort to reduce the threat posed by plutonium and other fissile material will be launched by the nuclear safety summit,” said a spokesman.

Campaigners claim that governments are too hesitant in introducing measures to curb illegal smuggling of nuclear raw materials.

They fear the West is unwilling to press Yeltsin on Russia's stocks of weapons material so as not to undermine his chances of re-election.

In the build-up to the summit, the European Commission's Joint Research Centre hosted its first ever technical meeting two weeks ago. European, Russian and US experts concluded that action should be taken to allow the Russian Federation full control over its nuclear materials.

Mindful of the need for common techniques for protection and accounting at nuclear facilities, the EU is setting up the “Russian Methodological and Training Centre” at Obninsk, near Moscow, where hundreds of Russian experts are to be trained in western nuclear accounting techniques.

The EU hopes this will build on the action it has already taken under the Tacis programme to help Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other former Soviet republics upgrade their nuclear reactors and improve the safety culture for all civil uses of nuclear energy.

The legacy of Chernobyl was highlighted at a conference held last week in Vienna, co-sponsored by IAEA, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Commission.

Experts estimate that 140,000 square kilometres (an area the size of Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland combined) were contaminated and, according to the WHO, the incidence of thyroid cancer in children is 100 times higher than it was before the accident.

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko claimed that his country spends 25&percent; of its annual budget on dealing with the effects of Chernobyl.

Under the Chernobyl closure programme, the EU made more than 100 million ecu available in 1994-95. Since the Corfu summit, it has been committed to providing a further 100 million ecu in Tacis grants and 400 million ecu in Euratom loans to help fund the G7 action plan for Ukraine's future energy policy.

Apart from the construction of a new sarcophagus to cover the reactor destroyed in 1986, the programme also includes support for two new reactors at Rovno and Khmelnitsky to replace Chernobyl when it is finally closed down, a policy condemned by environmental lobbyists.