One of the world's largest radioactive waste stores in northern Russia

Jun 5, 2007 07:42 GMT  ·  By

One of Russia's biggest radioactive waste storage facilities, located in the Kola Peninsula, in the Northwest, is, according to environmentalists, a ticking bomb, ready to explode in a short time if no countermeasures are taken.

The blast would be worse than the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986, as the facility stores 21,000 spent uranium fuel assemblies from nuclear submarines and ice-breakers. Although Russian officials consider the possibility of such a disaster to be very small, the three huge concrete tanks in which the radioactive waste is stored have begun to corrode and let in seawater.

"We are sitting on a powder keg with a burning fuse," claims Alexander Nikitin, from the St Petersburg office of the Norwegian environmental group, Bellona. "And we can only guess about the length of the fuse."

Radioactive waste are waste types containing radioactive chemical elements that do not have a practical purpose, and it's estimated that over the past 20 years, the oil-producing applications of the US have accumulated 8 million tons of radioactive wastes.

The problem with this storage facility is that salt water, that began to enter through cracks in the concrete walls, could accelerate disintegration of the fuel, splitting it into tiny particles. If the particles reach concentrations of 5-10% in water, it could be dangerous.

"Calculations show that the creation of a homogeneous mixture of these particles with water could lead to an uncontrolled chain reaction," warned the environmentalists.

Russia experienced such disasters in the time of the Soviet Union, an example being the accidental explosion of waste stored in Lake Karachay, during a dust storm after the lake had dried out. One still must not stop their car when driving through for any reason.

Unfortunately, getting in contact with radioactivity does not turn people into superheroes like Spiderman, instead it just kills them, so longterm exposure to radiation, at doses even less than that which produces serious radiation sickness, can induce cancer as cell-cycle genes are mutated.