A little over six years ago, Norwegian environmental activist Tomas Nilsen recalls standing on the Russian-Finnish border, trying to halt the passage of a cargo train loaded with Finnish nuclear waste into Russia.
The train, as he described it in a telephone interview from the Oslo offices of the environmental group Bellona, differed little in appearance from a standard, rundown cargo train - except for the heavy presence of armed Finnish military guards who were along for the ride.
Nilsen's group - positioned on the Finnish side - was arrested almost immediately. After the train trundled through customs, his colleagues on the Russian side said the guard gave way to a much, much smaller group.
"While we could get nowhere near the train in Finland, the security in Russia was far more lax."
As a result of the outcry surrounding the existence of such shipments, the Finnish parliament passed a law forbidding the export of its nuclear waste to foreign countries for disposal ever again. The State Duma also outlawed such imports shortly after.
But an aggressive campaign by Russia's Nuclear Minister Yevgeny Ada mov to repeal that law - amid popular, though little governmental, protest - looks set to succeed later this month. Adamov has recast waste imports as a money spinner that would net Russia's beleaguered nuclear sector $21 billion over the next 10 years. He has also said such a sum could be used to revamp old reactors, build new ones, and clean up contaminated areas.
But some experts have speculated this money will be used for other purposes - from the development of a highly controversial plutonium-based civilian nuclear economy, to military applications that could eventually be brought to bear on Chechen rebels.
In short, the host of dangers to Russia that could be caused by a few waste imports are almost immeasurable, according to authorities both outside and within the Russian nuclear industry.
TRAINS OF WASTE
Strikingly, Gosatomnadzor, Russia's own nuclear regulatory body, has opposed the waste-import bill ever since its inception.
The agency's opposition, however, has meant as little to the Nuclear Power Ministry, or Minatom, as the outcry of the general public, characterized by the ministry as too ill informed to understand the technical aspects of the nuclear industry
"Minatom has furnished us with hardly any information whatsoever," said one Gosatomnadzor official charged with reviewing the import bill.
"We have asked for documents time and time again," said the official, who requested anonoymity, in a telephone interview Thursday.
"They have sent us next to nothing, and what they do send is entirely unreasonable. They have no idea what routes the waste will follow, or how it will be transported - they have, in short, no sense of what is involved."
Comments posted on the Bellona Web site (www.bellona.no) from Gos atom nadzor's head, Yury Vishnevsky, were even more dispirited.
In his view, any of the proceeds garnered from the imports would be "either eaten up or stolen."
Nevertheless, the regulatory agency did prepare a small number of vaguely worded amendments, published on its own Web site, that will be submitted with the import law for the final reading. But the amendments clearly boil down to a set of simple customs regulations. To whit: Russia has the right to turn back any shipment Gosatomnadzor inspectors deem to be too dangerous to be transported, or which pose a threat to Russia's environment.
According to Igor Kudrik, a nuclear-industry expert at Bellona, the agency's status has been gutted, in a war of economics versus safety.
Nilsen said the most pressing dangers in transporting nuclear waste are presented by derailments or collisions. Any mishap would require large-scale and extremely expensive cleanup operations
"All soil in the affected area would have to be dug up and disposed of as nuclear waste," said Nilsen.
"These trains will also be traveling through some of the most populated areas of Russia, so a spill could displace thousands of people."
THE PLUTONIUM FACTOR
If what some experts foresee in Ada mov's import plans hold true, the price Minatom plans to charge for importing, and storing or reprocessing spent fuel - which yields plutonium, uranium, and liquid waste - could be one small part of an ambitious whole: the creation of a plutonium-based energy economy.
Experts say this has been a preoccupation of the Russian nuclear industry since the 1950s.
All that Russia needs for this is the money to develop a generation of special reactors called breeders - which, in brief, produce more plutonium than is fed to them - and the facilities to fabricate a special mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX.
Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Russia will be getting a MOX-fabrication plant as part of a very different plan that is meant to reduce the amount of surplus weapons-grade plutonium Russia now holds.
If the MOX fuel is burned in a retrofitted VVER-1000 reactor - Russia has seven of these - the plutonium is gradually rendered inert. A roughly similar program will be followed in the United States. If, however, MOX is run through a breeder, the plutonium becomes purer.
Presently, Russia has one breeder reactor that, at today's rates, cost $918 million to build. If Adamov's $21 billion waste-import plan reaches fruition, Russia would have the resources to build several breeders, plus a MOX plant to feed them with.
WORLDWIDE DANGERS
The public-relations image of MOX fuel took a hammering in 1999, when a shipment of the material to Japan - now the world's foremost purchaser of MOX - from Britain raised an international outcry.
The supplier, the Sellafield nuclear power station operated by British Nuclear Fuels Limited, was found to have falsified quality-control data on the fuel, and although two armed ships eventually delivered the tainted MOX to Japan, the British and Japanese governments agreed to send the fuel back to Britain.
At present, it is still sitting in Japan. (Ironically, Japan became interested in MOX after an accident at its Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor following a sodium coolant leak in 1995.)
Taking surplus weapons-grade plutonium and burning it as MOX in Russia's VVER-1000 reactors is central to the U.S.-Russia agreement. But according to Edwin Lyman, science director of the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute, those reactors are not up to the job.
"VVER-1000 reactors have problems processing the uranium fuel they were intended to use," he said in a recent telephone interview. For a variety of technical reasons, burning MOX in such a reactor is much more difficult to control, "and the margin of error ... is extremely narrow."
"It is a documented fact that Russia observes some of the worst standards of up-keep on its reactors imaginable," said Richard Rosenthal, the NCI's executive director. He added that any accident resulting from MOX use in a VVER-1000 would increase the risk of cancer in the affected area by 25 percent more than what the Chernobyl disaster managed.
"Putting plutonium into a VVER-1000 is a terrible idea."
While the DOE may shrug off such dangers, there is one aspect of the deal with Russia that is strangely missing: As of yet, no one is accepting liability should something go wrong.
According to the DOE's Laura Holgate, who brokered the plan, these questions will be addressed at a Group of Eight meeting this summer in Genoa, Italy. But it has been a major sticking-point so far.
THE TERRORIST THREAT
Other factors worrying observers of Adamov's import plan involve the vulnerability to terrorists of a train laden with nuclear waste. Though much of the waste shipped is virtually useless for the purposes of building a large nuclear device, Lyman underscored that "one can make a so-called 'dirty' nuclear bomb out of spent fuel."
Such fears have been a preoccupation of Western nuclear disposition organizations since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
"It takes a ball of plutonium the size of an orange to make a bomb more powerful than the one that destroyed Nagasaki," said Rosenthal. He added that trains carrying any of the nuclear material, be it spent fuel or MOX, would have to be guarded with "military force."
It is a familiar stance. For a few years from 1992 onward, the Western press was full of reports of the possible smuggling of fissile and other radioactive (but not necessarily weapons-usable) material. One notable report was an investigation carried out by the Frontline program from U.S. Public Broadcasting Service in November 1996, which detailed some of the biggest scares to that date.
On Nov. 23, 1995, a reporter for NTV claimed to have received a tip-off from Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, and uncovered a package containing cesium-137 buried under some leaves in Izmailovsky Park in northeast Moscow.
. On Dec. 14, 1994, 2.7 kilograms of uranium-235 was seized by police in Prague. According to the Frontline investigation, the supplier of the material, an Eduard Baranov from Obninsk, had been involved in a number of similar smuggling incidents of "loose nuke" material.
. Another Frontline report in 1999 revealed how U.S. agents were offered a chance to by small nuclear devices from two Lithuanians, who allegedly had links to a mysterious scientific institute in St. Petersburg, as well as to then Defense Minister Pavel Grachev.
But a DOE source who requested anonymity said that for all the fear that Russia's nuclear arsenal would slowly fall into the hands of the highest rogue state bidder, "not one bomb has been lost."
The source added that the MOX would be transported in the U.S. program via the same transportation infrastructure that kept nuclear arms on the move.
"I would assume that the Russians have a similar infrastructure," the source said.
But Bellona's Nilsen pointed out that such internal infrastructures are hard to locate because they run on secret schedules.
"This will not be so with international shipments," he said. "Protesters can get scheduling information and protest, pointing out those ships or trains that contain waste."
MILITARY USES
Another theory as to why Russia wants to import spent nuclear fuel was put forward by Moscow-based defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, in a column he wrote for The St. Petersburg Times on Jan. 9.
"In April 1999, the Security Council (President Vladimir Putin was the secretary of the Security Council at that time) ordered the Nuclear Power Ministry to speed up the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including so-called 'penetrators,'" Felgenhauer wrote.
"These weapons are designed to burrow down tens of meters underground before exploding. The Security Council also ordered the development of a new generation of very low-yield tactical, battlefield nuclear weapons.
"Immediately after Putin announced the Security Council decision, Adamov began to clamor for foreign nuclear waste and a bill was introduced in the Duma."
This theory was confirmed by Paul Beaver, a spokesman for Jane's, the highly respected defense, aerospace and transportation information group, in an interview from London on Wednesday.
"The British have a penetrator called Broach, which is being looked at by the French and the Americans," he said, "[but] it's one piece of technology the Russians are short of."
"In order to build a penetrator, you need depleted uranium, which means you need spent nuclear fuel. The Russians also need this for their anti-tank weapons - and it's also used in cruise missiles and guided bombs."
"One of the reasons they are so interested is because of the problems they have had hitting targets effectively in Chechnya."
If so, Felgenhauer noted, the irony is rich. All the West's financial help - selling spent fuel, and helping Russia with the MOX deal - will be used to build nuclear weapons that could be used against it.