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As parliament prepares to vote on a bitterly disputed
bill on importing spent nuclear fuel, a top nuclear safety expert warned Tuesday that
funds raised from the shipments
could end up being spent on upgrading nuclear weapons
and building new ones.
The $20 billion that the Nuclear Power Ministry intends
to earn from the import of
spent fuel could be spent on arms because the package of
amendments set to be
passed Thursday allows those funds to be placed in an
account closed to public
scrutiny, said Vladimir Kuznetsov, a State Duma official
and former head of the
government nuclear safety watchdog.
The Nuclear Power Ministry, which is lobbying to get the
bill passed on a second —
and perhaps an immediate third — reading this week,
denied the allegations Tuesday.
The bill sailed through the Duma on its first reading in
December. After a third reading
it goes to the Federation Council and then to President
Vladimir Putin for approval.
Kuznetsov told a news conference that any denials are
meaningless because Nuclear
Power Ministry deals are typically cloaked with secrecy.
"I personally believe that the money raised from the
imports will be spent on the
creation of new types of nuclear weapons and the
modernization of existing ones,"
said Kuznetsov, a member of the environmental advisory
council in the Duma and an
assistant to Deputy Sergei Mitrokhin.
"Sergei Sergeyevich [Mitrokhin] and I wrote many
requests to the Nuclear Power
Ministry demanding financial details about different
nuclear programs. … Similar
requests have been written by other deputies. But there
have never been any replies,"
Kuznetsov said.
What the ministry has provided parliament are broad
proposals for how the money
raised by shipments will be spent, he said. The ministry
says $7 billion will be used to
build new storage sites for spent fuel and radioactive
waste and an equal amount will
be spent on environmental programs. In addition, it
intends to pay $3.5 billion in taxes
to the government and sink the remaining $2.5 billion
into the upgrade of nuclear
facilities.
Yury Vishnevsky, who heads the nuclear safety watchdog
Gosatomnadzor once led by
Kuznetsov, said last weekend that he also doubts the
ministry would spend its
earnings as earmarked.
"Some cash will be paid as taxes, some to build new
transportation systems, some to
build new [reprocessing] facilities and some to maintain
them and pay the staff. There
will be no cash to spent on ecological programs," he
told the "Itogi" program on NTV.
But the Nuclear Power Ministry will never be held
accountable if it gets its way in
opening a special fund in which to place cash from the
nuclear program, said
Kuznetsov and Deputy Mitrokhin.
Provision for such a fund is among the package of
nuclear bills to be considered
Thursday, they said.
"Only a tiny group of selected deputies have access to
the closed parts of the
budget," Mitrokhin said. "There is no Duma or public
control over them. And if we
allow the ministry to collect all the revenues from
those imports in their own fund, we
will never know where the money went."
The Nuclear Power Ministry rejected the allegations as
"rubbish."
"This is all rubbish," said ministry spokesman Yury
Bespalko. "The fund will be open
and transparent. The public and the Duma will control
it.
"And the allegation that we are going to make weapons is
just ridiculous. I don't even
want to talk about it."
However, the Nuclear Power Ministry's current fund —
which is part of the federal
budget — is not fully open even now, said Galina
Anisimova, adviser to the State
Duma's budget committee.
She said the fund is slated to hold 13.9 billion rubles
($485.3 million) in 2001 and has
"open and closed parts."
She would not reveal any details about the closed parts
of the fund.
See the original at http://themoscowtimes.com/stories/2001/03/21/011.html
See also:
Nuclear
waste bill section of the web-site
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