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The State Duma gave final approval in 20 minutes Wednesday to
legislation opening Russia to imports of spent nuclear fuel, a
project environmentalists say will turn the country into a nuclear
dump.
Lawmakers voted 243-125 in favor of the package of amendments,
which advocates say could earn $20 billion over 10 years and help
clean up the nation's existing stock of nuclear waste.
"I am voting for this bill because I don't want places in
my country remaining dead zones, contaminated by radiation,"
said Deputy Yegor Ligachev, a Communist and a former member of
the Soviet Union's ruling Politburo.
The bills now have to win the approval of the Federation Council
upper chamber and then be signed into law by President Vladimir
Putin.
The international environmental group Greenpeace reacted to the
vote by calling on Washington to veto any shipments of spent fuel
to Russia from U.S.-designed reactors, a move it said could foil
the whole project.
Environmentalists and liberals have mounted fierce opposition
to the bills on grounds that proceeds, rather than going into
reprocessing the spent fuel, might be spent in other ways and
the radioactive waste would remain buried indefinitely.
Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the Yabloko party and one of the
main opponents of the bills, urged the Duma to reject the bill
for the sake of future generations.
"The vote today can make history," Yavlinsky told deputies.
"One hundred million Russian citizens are against it and
only 500 people are for — 300 members sitting here and 200 bureaucrats
who will be getting the money."
Yavlinsky says opinion polls show Russians overwhelmingly reject
the plan.
Before the debate got under way, Yabloko launched a last-ditch
attempt to stall the bills by asking deputies to put off the vote
and hold a referendum. The Duma rejected the move.
Deputies backing the bills said calls to postpone it or vote
it down played in the hands of foreign competitors trying to keep
Russia from entering the lucrative market of fuel reprocessing.
Under the project championed by the Nuclear Power Ministry, Russia
would import about 1,000 tons of fuel a year, roughly the amount
produced now by its own power plants and those in neighboring
Ukraine, which sends spent fuel for reprocessing.
The imported fuel is due to be stored until 2021 while Russia
upgrades its crumbling reprocessing facilities with the money
earned from prospective exporters, such as Taiwan, Japan, China,
Iran and Eastern Europe.
Russia is building a nuclear power plant in Iran despite strong
opposition from the United States, which sees the development
of nuclear technology in Tehran as a threat.
Greenpeace immediately called on U.S. President George W. Bush
to ban all shipments of spent fuel to Russia from U.S.-made reactors
around the world, which would drastically reduce Moscow's prospective
customer base since plant designers have a say in how waste from
reactors is treated.
"Without U.S. support the whole grandiose Nuclear Power
Ministry program shrinks down to the simple old Soviet practice
of taking back spent fuel from the socialist brother countries,"
Greenpeace International said in a statement.
Nuclear Power Minister Alexander Rumyantsev says France and Britain
have already carved up the market for depleted nuclear fuel and
Russia will have to fight to secure a share. Reprocessed fuel
can be used again, leaving small quantities of unusable radioactive
waste.
Rumyantsev lashed out at critics of the bills on the eve of Wednesday's
vote. "An extremely negative public relations attack is under
way. We are constantly being defamed," Rumyantsev said Tuesday
night on ORT television.
Reprocessing is to begin in 2021 and take place over a 20-year
period. Opponents say there are no guarantees that everything
will go according to plan and free of accidents.
"Mass imports of spent nuclear fuel mean unavoidable catastrophic
consequences for the ecology that will threaten the lives of Russians
for centuries to come," said a letter by members of the Russian
Academy of Sciences.
The letter was handed out by demonstrators outside the Duma.
A group of about 100 environmental activists and Yabloko members
rallied outside the Duma before the vote.
Vladimir Slivyak, co-founder of the Ecodefense environmental
group, expressed disappointment about the bill's approval.
"We have already started to form small environmental groups
throughout Russia whose members will block railroads when the
nuclear fuel is imported," Slivyak said.
"But we still hope that the Federation Council will block
the legislation," he said. "We know that about half
of the governors are against it, and the vote of only 50 percent
of the council's members are needed to block the bills."
(Reuters, MT, AP)
See also:
Nuclear
waste bill section of the web-site
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